Challenges in Cyber Threat Hunting
While cyber threat hunting offers many advantages, it also presents several challenges, including:
1. Skill and Expertise: Effective threat hunting requires specialized knowledge and skills in cybersecurity, data analysis, and forensic investigation.
2. Resource Constraints: Limited resources, such as time, budget, and manpower, may hinder the organization’s ability to conduct thorough threat-hunting activities.
3. Data Overload: The sheer volume of data generated by modern IT systems can overwhelm threat hunters, making it difficult to separate genuine threats from false positives.
4. Adversarial Tactics: Cybercriminals are constantly evolving their tactics and techniques to evade detection, making it challenging for threat hunters to keep pace with new threats.
What is Cyber Threat Hunting?
Cyber threat hunting involves actively searching through networks, endpoints, and datasets to identify malicious, suspicious, or risky activities that traditional security tools have missed. This proactive approach differs from cyber threat detection, which more passively monitors data and systems for potential security issues. While detection is essential and supports threat hunting, the proactive nature of threat hunting uses new intelligence on previously collected data to foresee and categorize potential threats before an attack occurs.
Security teams must acknowledge that no security system is completely secure and remain alert for new threats and vulnerabilities. Instead of reacting to alerts, cyber threat hunters develop hypotheses based on the known behaviors of threat actors and actively search their environments to validate these hypotheses. This process often involves deep reasoning and forensic analysis rather than starting from existing alerts or Indicators of Compromise (IOC). In many instances, the actions of a threat hunter lead to the creation of alerts or IOCs. By assuming that a breach has occurred or will occur, cyber threat hunters take an aggressive stance in identifying and addressing threats within their environments without solely relying on the latest security tools.