Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

If you’ve been following our series on the PEAK threat hunting framework, you might already know that the purpose of threat hunting isn’t just to find security incidents your automated detection systems missed. Finding incidents is more like a helpful side effect. The real reason to hunt is to drive improvement to your security posture over time.

As SOCs continue to grow and mature, it's vital that they establish effective and repeatable programs in proactive defense. This also means that threat hunting needs to become a critical function. Numerous advanced and sophisticated threats are able to get past more traditional cybersecurity defenses and SOCs need skilled Threat Hunters who are able to search, log, monitor, and remediate threats before they create a serious problem.

Cyber threat hunting is a proactive security strategy that involves searching for threats within a network before they can cause significant damage. Unlike traditional methods, which are reactive and wait for an alert before taking action, threat hunting seeks to actively identify and mitigate hidden threats that have evaded initial security measures. Threat hunting involves constant monitoring and data analysis to spot suspicious behavior that may indicate a cyber attack.

Baselines are an essential part of effective cybersecurity. They provide a snapshot of normal activity within your network, which enables you to easily identify abnormal or suspicious behavior. Baseline hunting is a proactive approach to threat detection that involves setting up a baseline of normal activity, monitoring that baseline for deviations, and investigating any suspicious activity.

If you have been reading our hunting series, you may have noticed that many threat hunting techniques center on network-centric data sources. Thus far, we have yet to speak about the big kahuna in our hunting tool chest. We are rectifying that right here, right now: we are going to talk about Microsoft Sysmon! In this article, we’re looking at using Sysmon to hunt for threats in endpoints.We’ll highlight some of the most valuable places to start hunting in your Windows logs.

Threat hunters are some of the most specialized and experienced workers in the SOC. They are incredibly valuable to the organization, but as the 2023 SANS Threat Hunting Survey finds, they’re continually being asked to multi-task and take on other duties. And that’s taking away from their primary job of hunting for threats. How can we change this status quo and help threat hunters (and the organizations they work for) be successful? That’s the million-dollar question.

When it comes to protecting data in an evolving threat landscape, two common strategies are at the forefront: incident response and threat hunting. While both processes can safeguard an organization's data, their approaches, objectives, and execution differ significantly. Understanding the differences between the two strategies is critical for organizations aiming to.

At Splunk, you may hear us pontificating on our ponies about how awesome and easy it is to use Splunk to hunt for threats. Why, all you need to do is use X and Y with Splunk to find a Z score (no zombies were injured) and BOOM! That baddie in your network is detected. Going back to at least a decade, we’ve tried to make it easy — as you’ll see in the resources below — and yet threat hunting is about as easy as telling someone how easy it is to draw an owl.

Oh no! You’ve been hacked, and you have experts onsite to identify the terrible things done to your organization. It doesn’t take long before the beardy dude or cyber lady says, “Yeah...they used DNS to control compromised hosts and then exfiltrated your data.” As you reflect on this event, you think, “Did I even have a chance against that kind of attack?” Yes, you did because Splunk can be used to detect and respond to DNS exfiltration.