Embracing Threat Hunting Is Pivotal To Data Security

Seven in every ten businesses are ill-prepared for a cybersecurity breach, according to Inc. On the flip side, those that are prepared to face data security threats often embrace cybersecurity from a reactive perspective – they only respond to threats once they affect them. While this might work out for businesses at times, it is no match to the threat intelligence that practicing threat hunting provides.

Ideally, threat hunting allows you to identify threats within your network before they fester. On the other hand, it also makes it easy to identify and eliminate subtle vulnerabilities before hackers can even identify them. The question is, how do you create a strong threat hunting strategy?

Here is a guide on building a great strategy and the pitfalls to avoid:

It Starts With the Right Infrastructure

To be honest, it might seem tough to invest in threat hunting infrastructure whereas you lack the baseline cybersecurity tools such as the Best network monitoring tools, malware detection systems and firewalls. Before starting out this strategy, you ought to have a strong base to help you detect threats as they happen. On the other hand, building a threat hunting strategy starts with identifying key parts of what you want to protect.

Understand common threats in your industry and geographical area. Since there is no magical tool to eliminate all these threats, you will typically need to layer different tools to come up with enough protection for your organization. Once you understand common industry threats, building the right layers of tools becomes quite easy.

Continuous Learning Is Key

The threat landscape is an ever dynamic one, especially for industries such as the health industry. One day you might be hunting for fileless attacks while the next day Wanacry might be the biggest threat that your business faces. As such, continuous insights into the current state of the threat landscape are key.

Other than having your threat hunting team technically trained on the task at hand, you should also help them in discovering current threats. If possible, send them to cybersecurity conferences to both interact with key individuals in the field and learn about any looming threat.

IT and Threat Hunting Teams Should Collaborate

While the threat hunting team might know the threats that you might face, this knowledge is useless as long as they don’t understand how your system works as well as who to talk to whenever they identify a threat. The trick is to improve communication between your IT team and the threat hunting team.

Not only can this trust between both stakeholders improve the detection of threats, but it can also be pivotal in eliminating the ad hoc threats. It all trickles down to how well the IT team can explain business processes, infrastructure, and program designs. Ideally, both teams should have a representative amongst them during tactical department meetings to help steer the conversation in the right direction. For instance, holding tabletop exercises will be more successful with both stakeholders being represented.

Record the Hunt Details

Recording the details of a hunt can not only be pivotal in eliminating future threats, but it can also become worthwhile when passing the data on to new threat hunters.

The details to record should include the reason for the hunt, the findings as well as the steps that were taken. Since record keeping is never successful without enough organization, you also need to invest in the right organization tools. This should include both reporting and analytical tools.

Conclusion

Being proactive in data security reduces the cost of trying to find a breach as well as eliminate it. It offers your IT team enough intelligence to prevent costly downtime. Consider building a strong threat hunting strategy to be steps ahead of cybercriminals.