For companies, who have trouble managing cyber defenses, threat hunting is one way to boost faltering security programs. Now you might think what is threat hunting? Well, it can be defined as a standard method of implementing tactics, tools, intelligence and procedures to unseal advanced network attacks, which have managed to deceive current security systems.
Due to its vast dimension, threat hunting’s popularity is growing. The resolute attackers use clandestine methods to manage to stay undetected while accessing corporate databases, applications and networks. And, a user should be aware of the same.
Now the Question Arises How to Detect them?
The actions like event and log analysis along with technologies such as endpoint detection & response assist companies to become more alert at rebuffing and flagging these modern hackers. Now with threat hunting, the work has become much easier with a human-driven component. Trained staff shadow hackers while taking advantage of the same thought processes and ability used by hackers.
The main security objective could be to prevent the bigger breach, threat hunting looks for anything exceptional which might show something wrong in your environment in the process rapidly growing visibility into your network, minimizing the risk.
Most of the times, this means unravelling something that is less damaging than a modern constant threat actor however critical as a non-regular activity which could affect your organization’s work processes.
A team on a threat hunt could find real hacker incidents or honest mistakes by an employee. So being security personnel, you must know all about it.
Hackers Using “Living off the Land” Technique
It is quite easy to find a loophole in the present state of security. However, a lot of organizations are making it difficult for network invader to achieve success. Due to this substantiality, the delinquents to switch to self-sustainable practices. A strategy called “living off the land” has become popular in the past years amidst all malicious intruders. In this strategy, hackers use tools approved and installed by the company’s IT team. For example – Powershell – legit admin tool to automate tasks and hackers could use it to do mostly file-less attack or steal credentials and go across the network.
Must Read : What Is SMiShing? Have You Been A Victim?
Policy Breakers Cutting Corners
Not all the insider threats are intentional. Some of them could be an employee trying to do his/her work. Let’s say, if an employee is using Power she’ll to automate tasks, however, is clueless that hackers might also use it as an advantage to run malicious scripts.
Strange User Behavior
Threat hunts could also find unusual user activity which could indicate probable threats which involves a dishonest insider. The threat hunt could also point out an employee’s unnecessary mass downloading or deletion of files, numerous request to mount privileges, late-night logins, and other activities which creates suspicion and are different from the normal duties of the employee. All of these could point what they are planning. Mostly they want to take revenge or switch job.
Old or Unused Machines
An organization could have a lot of workstations, and it is not necessary that all of them are active and being monitored. This includes risk to the company. These unused machines could be used as a medium to plan an attack, steal information and more.
Shadow IT
There are a lot of methods to provoke data leakage risks or malicious content in your company, and the growth of cloud-based services and software has increased the possibilities to a larger extent. Employees install applications with the thinking to enhance their productivity, however, they opened a door to a malicious attack while doing so.
So, with all this information surfaced, now you can instantly take risk-reducing actions within your company and save your company from future malicious attacks.
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