Even the mightiest and most prestigious companies and enterprises are not exempt from the sophisticated threats posed by cyber attackers. Your security team needs robust security measures for network security, endpoint security, threat detection, anomaly detection, data protection, security monitoring, application security and information security.
What is proactive threat hunting?
Proactive threat hunting is an advanced cybersecurity practice that involves actively searching for signs of suspicious activity, malicious activity or potential cyber threat within an organization’s network and systems. Unlike traditional cybersecurity measures that rely on reactive security controls and incident response, threat-hunting identifies and neutralizes potential or emerging threats before they can cause significant damage.
Proactive threat hunting leverages data analytics, machine learning, and threat intelligence to identify malicious behavior and undetected threats that might escape automated threat detection.
Skilled security analysts use modern SIEM platforms to dive into security data, network traffic, user behavior, and other relevant sources to uncover hidden threats.
Why SOCs shouldn’t wait for an alert to start searching for breaches
Most cyber threats move faster than traditional detections. While security analytics solutions are instrumental in monitoring and analyzing vast amounts of security data, they still have limitations. Reactive detections depend on known threats and predefined attack patterns, leaving gaps where emerging threats, unknown threats, and advanced threats can hide.
And on top of that, when you consider that hackers are now using more stealthy means of infiltrating networks, it’s high time that organizations take proactive precautionary measures and act in a preemptive rather than reactive manner.
Cybercriminals can penetrate systems undetected, so security threat awareness needs to be improved, with a specific emphasis on proactive threat hunting.
Adding extra layers of visibility is key
To anticipate the unknown and stay one step ahead of cybercriminals, SOC teams must be wary of every potential vulnerability in their system. With the move to cloud-based services and environments, organizations are more susceptible to an insider threat, cyber risk, MITRE ATT&CK®, or the potential threat of other varieties of cyberattacks.
And with the rise of remote work, more employees are using their personal, insecure networks instead of their more secure workplace networks. As networks become increasingly complex, SOC teams require greater visibility.
Meaningful visibility requires knowing:
- Who has and should have access to your network
- Which applications are being used
- What data is being accessed
Effective cyber threat hunting uses security analytics to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities that are otherwise missed by traditional tools. Instead of waiting for security events to trigger alerts, proactive threat hunting actively seeks out potential threats and vulnerabilities before they can cause significant harm.
An example of advanced analytics
User entity and behavioral analytics (UEBA) is a great example of how advanced analytics can be used for threat hunting. Using SecOps data collected and categorized by a security information and event management (SIEM) tool, UEBA leverages this data to perform essential analyses that help security professionals detect and respond to insider threats. UEBA solutions identify the baseline activities of all users; any anomalous activity atypical of a user will be automatically flagged, helping administrators take corrective action.
Common insider threats include:
- Departing employees
- Malicious insiders
- Negligent worker
- Security evaders
- Third-party partners
To ensure that security operations gain more intelligent and actionable insights into these risks, UEBA capabilities provide additional context by correlating UEBA with an entity timeline, helping security analysts understand what is happening and how it occurred.
Combined with this timeline, first-seen and outlier rules also identify anomalous user activity outside the baseline. UEBA can tag users and entities based on group membership to add context, allowing SOC analysts to further prioritize and investigate behaviors that lead to data exfiltration or unauthorized access.
How SIEM elevates your threat hunting
A modern, cloud-native SIEM is the core engine behind effective threat hunting. It centralizes data, enriches it, and correlates behavior across users, devices, workloads, and applications. Combined with cyber threat intelligence, analytics, and entity correlation, SIEM helps threat hunters investigate more effectively.
Key enablers for threat hunting
- Unified SIEM and log analytics: A SIEM provides the security data lake needed to test hypotheses, analyze signals, and explore suspicious activity across the environment.
- Entity-centric correlation: Advanced correlation links behavior across hosts, users, and cloud assets to find any hidden threats that may span multiple systems.
- UEBA: UEBA identifies outliers, deviations, and anomalies by learning normal activity patterns.
- Threat intelligence: Threat intelligence provides external context for what “bad” looks like.
- AI-powered assistants and agents: Using Sumo Logic Dojo AI, you can query faster, summarize logs, and reduce the time security analysts spend on manual tasks to speed up investigations and troubleshooting.
All these capabilities help you quickly detect and respond to any security threat in your environment.
Get proactive about threat hunting before it’s too late
Without proactive hunting, companies put their threat hunting teams at a disadvantage in uncovering unknown threats or other hidden threats, such as insider threats, which increases the likelihood of a cyberattack.
With proactive threat hunting, you:
- Enable security teams to seek out potential threats and vulnerabilities before they become critical incidents
- Reduce dwell time because threats are found before alerts fire
- Improve detection engineering from hunt findings
- Gain a continuous feedback loop that feeds new rules and enrichments back into SIEM
Discover how SIEM enables proactive threat hunting. Schedule a demo.
