In what important ways are you proactive to enhance your security posture? Do you truly understand your environment, to the point where you can identify symptoms of anomalous behavior with greater fidelity?
Below are a number of additional pointers to proactively modeling threat hunting. I should start out by addressing the value of being proactive in regards to securing your networks from various exposure dangers. I’ve been discussing this from a unique perspective as a result of having examined threats of any type in thousands of various organizational environments.
Active Security Personel
Regardless of what industry we’re in, we have seen an overreliance on reactive security strategies. Most security teams are unable to keep up with the pace of technology and their response in a timely manner. This possible trend is the result of companies replacing the latest and greatest technologies, instead of prioritizing efforts based on their vulnerabilities or security needs. Companies continue to invest in the future of humanity in many ways, which includes investing in specific high-grade technologies. These technologies, therefore, lead to the need to allocate funding for people’s own training, as well as additional costs for maintenance.
Another problem with the use of statistical methods for suspicious activity detection is that more advanced attackers will continue to know when static correlations are in place and so they may also try to circumvent them.
5 Threat Hunting Guidelines:
A proactive threat detection is a timely form of cyber defense that should be incorporated into your security strategies. Your team should not be simply reacting to a breach after it takes place; instead, they should be capable of preventing it before it ever occurs.
Start transitioning your team from reactive to proactive by following these guidelines on threat hunting:
Your investigation ought to have a goal you’ve established for yourself. Knowing what you want to achieve as you conduct the investigation is part of the battle. A suitable example goal might be checking firewall traffic for suspicious activity and unusual DNS traffic patterns.
Threat hunters should keep an eye on trending data during penetration tests to uncover the security gaps that allow efficient exploits. More effective attacks and slow prioritization of misconfigurations are often ignored by static checks. A smart attacker will understand that these checks exist and work around them. If you have observed similarities over 30-90 days, you will be able to accurately recognize the weaknesses in configurations or security procedures. Then, you can deal with the situations before you are caught off-guard.
A threat-hunting venture is an ongoing activity rather than a one-off deal. It should be iterative, where you are constantly tracking targets and actions. Some activities require that you take action after finishing them so you can then do so in more depth in subsequent iterations.
One instance is establishing Windows hygiene baselines (such as NTLM use, RC4 or DES encryption for Kerberos authentications, etc.), and then examining them to reduce noise that can make it harder to identify legitimate attacks. In the following stage, you will perform a step-by-step hunt for things like services provided by the group kerberoasting, passing the hash, or skeleton key. Moreover, after the steps are connected, you will also build static detection procedures to spot attempts to perform these kinds of attacks.
The goal is to constantly improve, understand, and understand your environment to set your team up to be able to recognize abnormal cases with higher precision. We are seeking wisdom. Each campaign, each mission is an opportunity to better understand your environment, apps, and users. Do not underestimate the reward of identifying and correcting hygiene issues, such as vulnerabilities due to misconfigured firewall rules, applications, scripts, and so on. You may never completely eliminate evil, but you can still recommend corrective steps to minimize it. For example, you need to set up DNS traffic to flow properly internally to DNS servers, externally to external internet-based resolvers (hygiene), and then try MITRE map attacks such as tunneling over common ports (T1043).
Once you’ve successfully completed every hunt campaign and action item, you should move towards making sure that appropriate logging levels and recording are set up so that you can maintain constant monitoring of hunt outcomes and baselines. For example, regularly check the authentication protocols of your environment to identify if NT LAN Manager (NTLM) is used by unapproved clients. By creating rule logic to merely look for Kerberos (Kerberoasting) anomalies on any kind of host, such as NTLM or RC4 DES encryption, you can establish exceptions.
These guidelines will help you to realize the image of threat hunters who efficiently take concerning risks. Your familiarity with the environment and safety will increase, thereby enabling you to increase the frequency of predictive analysis and replace reactive content with dynamic detection tools and automation.
Are You Ready to Learn More?
Transition your team members to proactive with TerraEagle.
TerraEagle receives data from diverse sources, including SIEM, EDR, multi-cloud, and third-party applications. The system allows your teams to run focused hunt campaigns, both scheduled and freestyle, in such a way that is strategic and iterative. Use TerraEagle to analyze indicators retrospectively or perform behavior assessments to visually display frequent from rare behavior.