With attackers lurking undetected in systems for months at a time, threat hunting is becoming an essential element of security.
Excerpt from: Threat hunting explained: Taking an active approach to defense
The goal of the security team has, of course, always been to stop bad things from happening as early as possible, whether that has meant shutting down an attempted hack from the outside or thwarting risky employee behavior.
Enterprise security teams often struggle to keep up, says Wolfgang Goerlich, advisory CISO for Duo Security, a Cisco business unit, which has offered workshops on threat hunting. SOCs are inundated with alerts about possible problems — so much so that they can’t possibly investigate each and every one. Cisco’s 2020 CISO Benchmark Report, in fact, found that 41% of organizations get more than 10,000 alerts a day.
Alert fatigue sets in and can keep security teams from being as effective as they could be. “If you’re constantly getting pinged, you can never think deeply and you can never think broadly,” Goerlich says.
He also points out that alerts generally indicate active attempts to attack and are not necessarily effective in finding threats that are either waiting for an opportune time to attack or are new and thus unknown to the monitoring systems.
Goerlich says he has seen how an overload of alerts coupled with a strictly reactive approach can leave an organization exposed. He led a red team simulating attacks on a company to test its security posture, using various tactics to try to get into the company’s systems. The security team did indeed identify the individual pieces of the attack, with monitoring systems alerting the SOC to phishing emails and malware. But while the security team successfully stopped individual attempts from exploding into full-blown events, they failed to see the big picture that there was an ongoing, multi-pronged coordinated attack.
“When you’re closing tickets in a fast manner — as you should be doing — you miss the full scale of what’s happening,” Goerlich explains.
But threat hunting, with its proactive approach and its focus across the IT stack versus alerts, helps security teams spot such activity.
Read the full article: https://www.csoonline.com/article/3570725/threat-hunting-explained-taking-an-active-approach-to-defense.html
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