Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

While security professionals know well that a defense-in-depth strategy is crucial to proper cybersecurity, sometimes a detailed story of how a threat was discovered and eradicated can bring the value home, especially to the uninitiated. This is one such story. In this case, the story relates to the value of employing a cybersecurity threat hunting service alongside a managed detection and response offering.

CrowdStrike is launching new innovations to power the AI-native security operations center (SOC) and help teams hunt and resolve threats with speed and accuracy. A new solution, CrowdStrike Falcon Adversary OverWatch Next-Gen SIEM, will bring managed threat hunting to available third-party data and extend the visibility of CrowdStrike’s elite threat hunters into unmanaged attack surfaces.

Stealthy adversaries continually exploit system utilities to execute malicious code. A particularly potent and frequently misused tactic is MITRE ATT&CK T1059 - Command and Scripting Interpreter, wherein attackers harness built-in interpreters like PowerShell, Bash, Python, or JavaScript to run arbitrary commands.

Success in threat hunting is vastly different from incident response. Incident responders can measure success in criteria like ticket volume, mean time to close, or escalations. For threat hunting, the number of hunts vs. incidents is not comparable because hunts take longer, and the average time to complete a hunt can vary wildly. More importantly, most hunts will not result in incidents. We can’t use the same metrics! Our critical metrics of success are our outputs/deliverables and documentation.

In the shadowy depths of your network, whispers grow louder — something isn’t right. Adversaries are on the prowl, targeting the very keys to your kingdom: your credentials. T1003 - OS Credential Dumping is their weapon of choice to steal password hashes and sensitive authentication materials. They quietly harvest secrets to impersonate users, escalate privileges, and move laterally through your environment.

In November 2024, I participated in SCinet with the Network Security team at SC24. My job was supporting Corelight sensors and threat hunting using the data the sensors produced. This engagement allowed for a very constructive comparison between the networking challenges at SC and Black Hat USA, where I had the honor of working in the Network Operations Center (NOC) a few months earlier. At SC, I felt immersed in the cutting-edge world of research computing with people showcasing the fastest everything.

Cross-domain attacks have become a defining challenge in modern cybersecurity, with adversaries exploiting gaps across endpoints, identity systems, and cloud environments to achieve their objectives. These sophisticated attacks use stealthy, malware-free techniques and legitimate tools, making them exceptionally difficult to detect and disrupt.

Organizations want to stay on top of cyber threats and detect them even before they occur. To do this, they need to detect threats and anomalies in their networks as quickly as possible. This is what we call threat hunting. It is a tool to help organizations constantly monitor their networks to detect and mitigate threats to keep them at a distance.