In this step, the hunter should think through the overall techniques that could be used, the targets within the network that could be attacked, and the various vulnerabilities that can be exploited. The malware is, 7 min read - In February 2023, X-Force posted a blog entitled Direct Kernel Object Manipulation (DKOM) Attacks on ETW Providers that details the capabilities of a sample attributed to the Lazarus group leveraged to impair visibility of the malwares operations. The next step would be to aggregate on Command Line to conduct a frequency analysis. This document is intended to guide an experienced threat hunter through the process of initiating a hunt, gathering and enriching data, then taking the required action. It also facilitates measuring outcomes, presenting findings to incident responders, and incorporating whats learned into the organizations automated alerting infrastructure. A threat hunting framework is a system of adaptable, repeatable processes designed to make your hunting expeditions both more reliable and more efficient. Cyber threat hunting is an active information security strategy used by security analysts. Hunters will also need to document where data comes from to ensure that sources are both contextualized and consistent. Process = Powershell.exe & Command_Line contains DownloadFile, DownloadString, Base64ToString, Invoke-Shellcode, EncodedCommand. How much damage can potential threats cause? Security analytics strives to go beyond basic SIEM systems to offer deeper insights into your security data. Once extended storage and management is enabled with enriched security telemetry, security teams gain the needed visibility and context for their investigations to accelerate detection and response of potential threats. Managed EDR NEU. XLSX NIST Computer Security Resource Center | CSRC Once the SIEM has the alert based on an IoC, the threat hunter can investigate the malicious activity before and after the alert to identify any compromise in the environment. 2005-2023 Splunk Inc. All rights reserved. After checking out all the items on the list, youre left with a functional threat-hunting hypothesis; a solid, fact-supported conclusion, relevant to your industry/business, and necessary for mitigating risk and ensuring continuity. Custom hunting is based on situational awareness and industry-based hunting methodologies. They are skilled IT security professionals who search, log, monitor and neutralize threats before they can cause serious problems. Additionally, a good buddy of mine, Roberto aka @cyb3rward0g, put together a great tutorial on this via Sysmon and ELK; check it out here. Combining security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM), security information and event management (SIEM) offers real-time monitoring and analysis of events as well as tracking and logging of security data. Although this is exactly how some organizations approach it, Im here to tell you: thats not the best way to think about threat hunting. If youve been living under a rock though, MITREs Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge is a curated knowledge base and model for cyber adversary behavior. The framework consists of 11 tactics, from initial access, execution, all the way through command and control and data exfiltration. The art of threat hunting finds the environment's unknowns. Literally, every corner of the Internet is flooded by facts and information even a rudimentary Google search such as latest vulnerabilities can unlock an array of data that can potentially be used to weave a functional threat-hunting hypothesis. analysis have served as a cornerstone for an organization's. Some will add machine learning-aided anomaly detection to help them better understand baseline conditions in the environment. A threat hunting framework is a collation of data-driven adversarial scenarios, backed up by hypothetical, field-tested, or time-honored TTPs (i.e., Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures). Threat hunting is evolving from focusing on IoCs to TTPs in order to understand the entire breadth of an attack, rather than simply stringing together its artifacts. This often is the cue for a hunter to start looking for pre- and post-detection patterns. They can also use other tools, like packer analyzers, to execute network-based hunts. In this article, were going to explore model-based threat hunting, go over wireframing prerequisites, and cover a couple of framework-optimization aspects. This framework can be extremely useful for gauging an environments level of visibility against targeted attacks with the tools that have been deployed across your endpoints and perimeter. This is the classic approach, where hunters form a supposition about potential threats and their activities that may be present on the organizations network, then use data and analysis to confirm or deny their suspicions. Hunters can skip, reorder, or add steps to each phase, tailoring their approach to suit the situation at hand. As you probably know by now, data comes in many shapes and sizes alerts and flags from your proprietary database, open-source stashes, forums, and even hearsay can help even the odds. It is aligned with the MITRE ATT&CK framework, and it leverages global detection playbooks to identify advanced persistent threat groups and malware attacks. After youve gone through this exercise, your goal will be to construct as many detection signatures as possible, mapping them to the specific technique used, along with providing a severity level to delineate between your response times upon triggering. Combining the big data harvested by security technology with faster, more sophisticated, and more integrated machine learning and AI, security analytics can accelerate threat investigations by providing detailed observability data for cyberthreat hunting. 2005-2023 Splunk Inc. All rights reserved. Threat hunting is the art and science of analyzing the data to uncover these hidden clues. So what does that mean? During this stage, evidence is correlated and subject to analytical and visualization techniques to uncover relationships within it. Until next time, Happy Hunting! Download the annual Threat Hunting Report. Sophos EDR Threat Hunting Framework Generally speaking, the easier it is to detect an IoC, the less likely its detection is to interfere with attackers ability to accomplish their objectives. A revolutionary platform that provides security teams with an advanced risk-centric view of their entire IT landscape. Your clients' risks are your opportunities: how an industry-recognized security framework can help you find, manage, and mitigate risk; What is layered security: how cybersecurity is a natural fit for MSPsand why today's hybrid environments . This framework is aligned to intel-based hunting. After sneaking in, an attacker can stealthily remain in a network for months as they quietly collect data, look for confidential material, or obtain login credentials that will allow them to move laterally across the environment. The video clip below is taken from our webinar, Understand, Deploy, and Hunt with MITREs ATT&CK Framework, and is presented by Tim Bandos, Digital Guardian's VP of Cybersecurity. Also, take into account the size of the job an endpoint-centric investigation is not that big of a deal, but a full-fledged, company-wide audit requires resourcefulness aka automation. (PDF) A Framework for Effective Threat Hunting - ResearchGate The PEAK threat hunting framework identifies three primary types of hunts: Hypothesis-Driven Hunts Baseline Hunts Model-Assisted Threat Hunts (M-ATH) In this post, we're going to look at hypothesis-driven hunting in detail. Threat hunters gain more insights, faster, and can spend more time hunting for malice, spend less time worrying about the accessibility data sets, and help dramatically improve the overall security posture of the organization. Threat Hunting Framework: Three Steps to Translate Threat Reports into THE HUNT MATRIX BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER In this article, we will delve into the intricacies of threat hunting, including its purpose, benefits, drawbacks and the various frameworks available to help guide your efforts. There are a number of frameworks out there, the most notable are the following. With the use of a scalable cloud infrastructure, a good security service then aggregates and perform real-time analysis on these large data sets. From there, the hunt follows predefined rules established by the SIEM and threat intelligence. Intrusion analysts must have expertise to identify sophisticated targeted attacks, and they also must have the necessary security resources to respond to any discovery of unusual behavior. Now that the threat hunter has discovered this malfeasance, it shall truly Only Live Once and never again! Thursday, 07 May 2020 1:00PM EDT (07 May 2020 17:00 UTC) Speaker: Trevor Daughney. The hunter identifies the threat actors based on the environment, domain and attack behaviors employed to create a hypothesis in alignment with the MITRE framework. Offer valid only for companies. RedHunt: Virtual Machine for Adversary Emulation and Threat Hunting by RedHunt Labs; Oriana: Oriana is a threat hunting tool that leverages a subset of Windows events to build relationships, calculate totals and run . Think of this as almost like a hybrid of the hypothesis-driven and baseline types, but with substantial automation from the ML. Running the functions DownloadFile, DownloadString, Base64ToString, Invoke-Shellcode, EncodedCommand, etc. Using the MITRE ATT&CK Framework for Detection and Threat Hunting. How to Generate a Hypothesis for a Threat Hunt - Cybereason This makes it easier to repeat the investigative strategies that have given you the best results. Definition, Techniques & Steps Kaye Timonera February 17, 2023 Threat hunting starts with a pretty paranoid premise: That your network may have already been breached and threat actors may be. The hunters approach is based on this research. IBM Security Managed Detection and Response (MDR) delivers a turnkey, 24x7 threat prevention, detection, and response capability. In other words, an organization must first have an enterprise security system in place, collecting data. Now that youve come up with a working theory, its time to gather the relevant data to back up your claim. Top 5 Cloud Security related Data Breaches! They search for hidden malware or attackers and look for patterns of suspicious activity that a computer might have missed or judged to be resolved but isn't. That way, the next time malicious activity will be alerted and responded to quickly. For instance, if you have a hunch that a threat actor might be using an inherently unsecured port to exfiltrate data, it would be a good idea to pull out the firewall logs. Hunters use data from MDR, SIEM and security analytics tools as a foundation for a hunt. Building Your Threat Hunting Framework: Key Considerations We can summarize TaHiTI as: The PEAK Threat Hunting Framework incorporates experience gained and lessons learned during the last several years of threat hunting. What Is Threat Hunting - Steps and Advice Communication and collaboration skills are also important for anyone interested in how to become a threat hunter. Download the threat hunting white paper, Proactive Hunting: The Last Line of Defense Against the Mega Breach, to get a detailed analysis of how highly skilled human hunters pair with technology to aggressively seek out threats.Download White Paper. For our purposes, the most popular definition is probably the best: threat hunting is the name for any manual or machine-assisted process for finding security incidents that your automated detection systems missed. You can watch the full webinar here. Copyright 2023 - Cybersecurity Insiders, Two Years Since the Colonial Pipeline Hack, Heres What Weve Learned, Encrypting files and emails: A beginners guide to securing sensitive information, Navigating the complex world of Cybersecurity compliance, How to Protect Operational Technology (OT) from Cyber Threats, far more likely to detect vulnerabilities, Embracing Advanced Frameworks for Effective Vulnerability Management, List of Countries which are most vulnerable to Cyber Attacks. Threat-hunting is more than a buzzword that polarizes the cybersecurity world; the new (i.e., proactive cyber-stance) doesnt need to outtake the old (i.e., traditional cybersecurity), but to add more nuances, additional layers, additional granularity, and more control over the environment and its assets. Significantly improve detection rates and accelerate time to detect, investigate and remediate threats. The resolution phase involves communicating relevant malicious activity intelligence to operations and security teams so they can respond to the incident and mitigate threats. Can I afford to commit the necessary resources? Security Architect and Consultant, IBM Security. Custom hunting. Threat hunting is the practice of proactively searching for cyber threats that are lurking undetected in a network. NIST Launches Cybersecurity Initiative for Small Businesses Just because a breach isn't visible via traditional security tools and detection mechanisms doesn't mean it hasn't occurred. A structured hunt is based on an indicator of attack (IoA) and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) of an attacker. In our next chapter of Threat Hunting with MITREs ATT&CK Framework - Part 2 - Ill focus on some more advanced use cases and go into additional details around some of my favorite techniques to use while out in the field. He is also a SANS Certified Instructor, where he teaches FOR572 Network Forensics and Threat Hunting. PEAK, an acronym for "Prepare, Execute, and Act with Knowledge," brings a fresh perspective to threat hunting. Watch CrowdCast. Threat hunting: Part 1Why your SOC needs a proactive hunting team However, using SIEM and MDR tools require that all essential sources and tools in an environment are integrated. Collins said the best threat hunters are independent thinkers but not lone rangers, working with other IT professionals to access operations data and identify hunting leads. For example, a security team may search for advanced threats that use tools like fileless malware to evade existing defenses. To test out your own environment, I highly recommend checking out Red Canarys Atomic Red Team framework on Github. To shine a light on dark and hidden areas of a network that are often assumed to be clean of infestations. Harness the power of human-driven pattern recognition. READ: How To Use the MITRE ATT&CK Framework. When a hunter figures out a new way to detect malicious behavior, the goal is to also figure out how to automate that detection. Typically, the items at the top are legitimate (but not always) since they occur more frequently and across the enterprise on multiple endpoints. Our curiosity, imagination and ability to deduce patterns of malicious activity even when we have never encountered them before are simply beyond the capabilities of todays technology.