Today’s threat actors are increasingly sophisticated, necessitating proactive cybersecurity strategies like threat intelligence and threat hunting to defend against advanced adversaries. Operationalizing these practices within security operations enables organizations to detect unknown threats earlier and improve response times. #eSentire #ThreatHunting #ThreatIntelligence
Keypoints
- Threat hunting involves actively searching for signs of compromise by investigating both known IOCs and attacker behaviors aligned with MITRE ATT&CK techniques.
- Operationalizing threat intelligence means transforming raw data into actionable insights integrated into detection systems and security workflows.
- Threat intelligence has four levels: strategic, tactical, operational, and technical, each serving different roles within cybersecurity operations.
- Operationalizing threat hunting requires embedding it into core security processes with hypothesis-driven investigations and continuous tuning.
- IOC-based threat hunts focus on validating known indicators quickly, while behavior-based hunts explore unknown or stealthy adversarial activities.
- Detection engineering converts findings from threat hunting and intelligence into automated detection rules and response playbooks for SOC teams.
- eSentire’s Threat Response Unit uses an Infinite Loop Threat Framework to continuously gather intelligence, conduct hunts, and build detections, demonstrating a mature operational model.
MITRE Techniques
- [T1078] Valid Accounts – Threat hunting looks for evidence of credential abuse within cloud infrastructure, as in the question “Are there signs of credential abuse within our cloud infrastructure?”
- [T1086] PowerShell – Hunters use behavioral and anomaly-based analysis including custom scripts consistent with techniques like unusual command executions.
- [T1046] Network Service Scanning – Hunting investigates command-and-control beaconing activities that indicate adversary network reconnaissance.
- [T1560] Archive Collected Data – Data exfiltration over uncommon protocols is monitored as part of behavioral threat hunting analytics.
- [T1055] Process Injection – Hunting seeks lateral movement across critical systems, which may involve process injection or similar techniques.
Indicators of Compromise
- [File Hashes] Used in IOC-based threat hunts for quick validation – examples include known malicious hashes referenced during threat sweeps and 2 more hashes.
- [IP Addresses] Identified in threat intelligence feeds – known malicious IP addresses incorporated into detection systems and IOC scans.
- [Domains] Employed as technical-level intelligence for detection and hunting – domains linked to threat actor infrastructure detected in network logs.
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