Why Businesses Need Cyber Threat Hunting

Automated security products are essential to protect against today’s advanced threats, but no tool is 100% effective. Attackers continuously evolve and automated tools can only react, so even a solution that is 99.9% effective will still be bypassed as cyberattacks increase in volume and severity.

Once inside a network, attackers often hide for months before discovery, elevating privileges and extracting data to set the stage for a significant cyber incident. Cyber threat hunting adds a crucial human element that digs deeper than traditional detection technologies. Threat hunters continuously research the latest tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) threat actors utilize, leveraging those insights to search for indicators of compromise (IoCs) that automation can’t find.

In this blog, we’ll discuss everything businesses need to know about threat hunting, the benefits, and which tools are essential to conducting effective threat hunts.  

What is cyber threat hunting?

Cyber threat hunting looks for threats that may have bypassed your company’s security controls. Threat hunting is typically done by hand as opposed to using automated techniques. The goal of threat hunting is to reduce the time between a breach and discovery, sparing organizations from the time, money, and reputational damage of a full compromise. The average data breach will cost a company around $4 million dollars, but the harmful effects can last for months or even put an organization out of business.

Threat hunters are skilled security professionals who search, document, monitor, and contain threats before they cause serious problems. Threat hunters comb through data, search for hidden malware, and look for patterns of suspicious activity that automated technologies might have missed. Threat hunting teams also provide remediation guidance to patch any flaws discovered in an organizations security program to prevent the same type of attack from happening in the future.

Threat hunting includes:

• Generating a hypothesis on potential malicious activity
• Combing through granular security data
• Using threat intelligence to uncover indicators of further compromise
• Searching for hidden malware
• Observing patterns of suspicious behavior

What are the benefits of threat hunting?

Cyber threat hunting benefits businesses in many ways, but here are a few businesses will quickly notice:

1. ‍Faster Investigations and response times: It takes companies an average of 277 days (or about nine months) to identify and contain a breach, and the longer the time between system failure and response deployed, the more it can cost an organization. Effective threat hunting helps reduce the time from intrusion to discovery, minimizing the amount of damage attackers can do.
2. Deeper understanding of your security posture: Beyond identifying undetected threats, threat hunting helps businesses gain a holistic view of their overall security posture. From there, it’s easier to identify and patch potential weaknesses before a threat actor can exploit them.‍
3. Improved internal cybersecurity knowledge: Threat hunters are highly trained cybersecurity professionals that bring a wide range of expertise to a business. Threat hunters can help strengthen a businesses internal knowledge on a variety of topics including incident response, malware analysis, forensics, security analytics, and more.

Essentials of effective threat hunting

Successful threat hunting takes time, expertise, and the support of sophisticated security solutions. Three things every business needs to start threat hunting include:‍

1. ‍Team expertise: Security products have advanced capabilities, but the most powerful threat hunting tool is still human experience and expertise. Today’s threat actors continuously engineer new ways to bypass automated security solutions and breach environments. Human intervention from experienced security analysts is critical to identifying sophisticated, targeted attacks. An Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider should apply both threat intelligence and hunting to identify and remediate all types of threats. Combining  support from security analysts and next-gen detection technologies reduces the dwell time of attacks and delivers fast, decisive responses. ‍
2. Structured data: Visibility is critical to successful threat hunting, so a key capability is to gather and store a large amount of granular system event data to provide complete visibility across users, endpoints, networks, devices, SaaS apps, cloud, and more. Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) solutions are a crucial threat hunting tool because they provide real-time monitoring and analysis of events along with security data tracking and logging. SIEM continuously monitors user behavior to detect anomalies and generate leads for threat hunters to conduct deeper investigations. Beyond visibility, SIEM gives threat hunters the ability to search data trends across a certain retention period of days, weeks, or years.‍
3. Threat intelligence: Finally, threat hunting requires access to threat intelligence and time to keep up with the latest security industry discoveries. Threat intel can consist of OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence), internally generated threat intelligence (for example, from your MDR provider) or paid threat sources and feeds. Organizations also must be able to cross reference internal data with threat intel to identify risks in their environments.

How Todyl can help

Threat hunting requires time, money, resources, and expertise that many organizations can’t afford to fully support internally. However, there are managed security solutions that have the right resources—extensive threat hunting experience, data, and analytical tools—to effectively hunt for unusual activity and hidden threats. Todyl’s MXDR team supports your cyber threat hunting efforts with expertise from top security analysts and sophisticated detection technologies.

Todyl’s MXDR team consists of former NSA analysts, Naval cybersecurity specialists, and leaders at enterprise incident response firms. These experts leverage Todyl’s global threat insights, intelligence sources, and sophisticated technology to conduct proactive threat hunting. Todyl has a unique ability to both generate and block threat intelligence in near real-time because of its comprehensive visibility into the business and security stacks through our Managed Cloud SIEM module. The team constantly monitors for malicious activity, adding new preventions and detections to block evolving threats.

To learn more about MDR technologies and how Todyl proactively protects businesses, read our eBook, Best Practices for Choosing an MDR Provider.