What is Threat Hunting?

Threat hunting is the deliberate process of defining cyber threats and actively searching for cyber threats within your network, even if no alerts have been triggered. Unlike traditional security measures that wait for anomalies to be flagged, threat hunting takes a proactive approach—seeking out cyber threats that may be lurking unnoticed.

Understanding Your Adversaries

Even though cyber security is becoming more sophisticated, breeched continue to climb. Simply waiting for breaches to happen is not enough. You need to be actively searching to maintain a secure network. As a result, this will help you gain a securer position against your adversaries, but it is crucial to understand them better.

Adversaries are adept at gaining unauthorised access and remaining undetected for extended periods. While their techniques may be similar, their motivations can vary significantly. To effectively defend against these threats, it’s crucial to take the following steps:

• Identify Potential Threat Actors: Understand who might target your business and why. Assess whether your company holds valuable assets—such as intellectual property, customer data, or financial information—that could make it a target.

• Establish a Baseline for Normal Activity: Define what constitutes normal activity within your network, so you can quickly identify unusual behaviour. This includes monitoring physical connectivity, network utilisation, protocol usage, peak network activity, and average throughput.

• Study Adversary Techniques: Familiarise yourself with common tactics used by human hackers. While no two attacks are identical, understanding the general phases and techniques of a typical attack can help you anticipate and detect threats before they escalate.

Self assessments can be complex, so we’d advise seeking a cyber security assessment with a professional to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Contact Northstar today for more information.

Key Steps in a Cyber Attack

To effectively defend against cyber threats, it’s important to understand the typical steps an attacker takes to breach a network. Below is a summary of a typical way a hacker might infiltrate your network and attack your system.

1. Research

   • Attackers begin by gathering publicly available information about your organisation, such as network ranges, IP addresses, domain hostnames, and email addresses of key personnel. This information is often used to launch phishing attacks.

2. Penetration

   • Attackers then breach your network, typically using phishing, malware, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, or vulnerability exploitation. Tools such as password crackers, encryption tools, and port scanners may also be employed to gain unauthorised access.

3. Expansion

   • Once inside, attackers use a technique known as pivoting, which involves leveraging a compromised device to move laterally through the network. By doing so, they expand their access and gain deeper visibility into your network, often seeking administrative credentials or other sensitive information.

4. Exploitation

   • In this final stage, the attacker escalates privileges, exfiltrates data, and establishes command and control communication. They may also destroy data or deny access, all while taking measures to cover their tracks.

How does threat hunting help?

Threat hunting focuses on the expand and exploit phase, and the pivoting location determines where they are. You have to imitate what they might do to find weaknesses, for example, where they entered. The deeper you investigate, you will be able to find security areas in which you can improve.

Of course, you never want a hacker to exploit your system. However, if they do, you can use this information to make your network more secure.

Getting Started with Threat Hunting

To effectively engage in threat hunting, your organisation needs a mature security infrastructure. This includes:

• Automated Tools: Utilise automated blocking and monitoring tools like firewalls, antivirus software, endpoint management systems, network packet capture, and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools.

• Unified Data Analysis: Threat hunting involves analysing vast amounts of data. Having a tool that can consolidate disparate data sets and enable easy analysis is key to extracting insights efficiently. Human expertise remains essential, but computer assistance is needed to handle the volume of data involved in modern threat hunting.

What is Managed Threat Detection?

Achieving 100% threat detection is impossible, and traditional security solutions like IDS and SIEM are often not sufficient on their own. This is where threat hunting comes in. However, maintaining a dedicated threat hunting team is a resource-intensive endeavour, making it impractical for many small and medium-sized businesses.

In these cases, managed threat detection offers a cost-effective and efficient solution. Managed services provide continuous monitoring, detection, and response capabilities—without the overhead of hiring a full-time security team.

Why Choose Northstar for Managed Threat Detection?

At Northstar, our team is equipped to manage, detect, and respond to threats across diverse industry verticals. We offer:

• Comprehensive Threat Hunting: With experience across multiple industries, we provide a holistic view of potential threats and a tailored approach to mitigate them.

• 24/7/365 Monitoring and Response: Our threat hunting and monitoring operations are active around the clock, ensuring your network remains secure, regardless of evolving threats.

• Validating Security Daily: The threat landscape changes constantly, and we evolve alongside it. Our team continuously validates and improves our threat hunting operations, adapting to emerging attack methods and trends.

The threat landscape is dynamic, and staying ahead of adversaries requires proactive effort and sophisticated resources. By partnering with Northstar, your business gains access to experienced threat hunters who work tirelessly to keep your data secure.

For more information about threat hunting and how your business can benefit, contact Northstar today.