You may think it would be obvious if your business were under attack from a cyber threat. Wouldn’t there be clear signs that data was being stolen or systems were being hacked? While this is often true, the reality is that nearly a third of breaches go undetected initially, leaving hackers significant time to gradually take over your systems.
Proactive security measures are needed to root out these threats early on and protect your business from the potentially devastating effects of a breach. In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at a forward-thinking cybersecurity method: threat hunting.
What Is Threat Hunting
Threat hunting is a proactive approach to cybersecurity that involves seeking out (aka hunting) and eliminating unknown cyber threats that may have infiltrated an organization’s network. It focuses on finding and mitigating attacks the company doesn’t know about yet, while traditional cybersecurity generally responds to known threats.
Conventional cybersecurity also relies on automated systems, while threat hunting involves careful data analysis and manual investigation to uncover hidden threats that are in the early stages or don’t have recognizable patterns. By combining both approaches, businesses can effectively stay ahead of breaches and quickly resolve issues, creating a more resilient security strategy.
How Threat Hunting Works
While all threat hunting methods involve collecting and analyzing large amounts of data, each one takes a slightly different approach:
Structured (aka Hypothesis-Driven) Hunting
This method relies on crowdsourced information about the known tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of current threats, as well as their indicators of attack (IoA). Threat hunters create hypotheses about these potential threats and then analyze a company’s data and systems, searching for any signs of a breach.
Unstructured Hunting
The unstructured approach is a more reactive form of hunting that’s guided by indicators of compromise (IoC). Tech teams may notice anomalies or inconsistencies that could be signs of an attack. They then launch a large-scale analysis to discover further details about the threat and determine how to eradicate it.
Situational or Entity-Based Hunting
Entity-based hunting is tailored to an organization and based on information from risk assessments and network evaluations. Details about a company’s assets, structure, and operations can help threat hunters determine which resources are the biggest targets and which threats the company is most susceptible to, which can guide their analyses.
Why It Matters
According to experts, it often takes a significant amount of time to identify a data breach, with hackers potentially infiltrating your network and stealing data over an extended period before you notice any signs.
Effective hunting allows you to catch these subtle attacks early on, before there’s even any evidence that something is off. This significantly decreases the amount of time the threats stay in your systems, minimizing their effects and ensuring your network and data stay secure.
Who Needs Threat Hunting
Organizations of all sizes and across all industries need this to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. However, businesses handling valuable customer data, such as financial institutions, healthcare providers, and government entities, are prime targets for hackers and can greatly benefit from enhanced proactivity and protection.
Stay Ahead of Threats with Run Networks
A secure network is crucial to your business’s success, and at Run Networks, we’re dedicated to making sure your data and systems are safe at all times. When you partner with us, you have access to a comprehensive suite of proactive cybersecurity services that are designed to stop attacks before they even happen. Your security is our priority, and we’re ready to provide customized solutions that will help you stay one step ahead of the threats. Send us a message to schedule your network evaluation or learn more about our cybersecurity services.
