Benefits of threat hunting

Threat hunting mitigates overall risk to the organization through the following benefits:

• Proactively uncover security incidents

• Better threat response

• Improve SOC effectiveness

• Uncover potential visibility gaps within the environment

• Detect advanced persistent threats

Proactively uncover security incidents

• Threats not detected by traditional means are discovered through threat hunting

• Allows organizations to detect potential security threats before they cause a significant impact

• Organizations can quickly mitigate threats, using knowledge obtained during the hunting process

Better threat response

Actively searching for threats improves overall response process, as there is a better understanding of the scope and characteristics of a threat

Reduces average detection delta and helps organizations respond more quickly to security incidents

Data gathered from past hunts can significantly reduce investigation time when responding to security incidents

Improve SOC effectiveness

Threat hunters can classify certain threats and event types as false positives as they perform a hunt. This reduces false positives that SOC analysts deal with

Knowledge gained during a hunt can be used to suggest changes to alert policies and increase their effectiveness

Reduce alert fatigue by enabling SOC analysts to focus on critical security threats

Uncover potential visibility gaps

Threat hunters review data sources required for each hunt they undertake

During this feasibility analysis process, they come across situations where data is inconclusive due to various reasons:

• Logging not enabled

• Blind spots within the network

• Lack of capabilities

• Data not collected or aggregated

This process helps uncover visibility gaps that help organizations to address tactically or strategically

Detect Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)

• Zero-days and APTs can be difficult to detect with traditional tools

• Hypothesis-driven approach with threat hunting allows an organization to specifically hunt for advanced threats the organization/industry faces

• Threat hunting provides an in-depth look at an environment and a greater possibility of detecting advanced threats