Advanced Threat Hunting: Key Techniques and Tools Explained

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Advanced Threat Hunting: Techniques and Tools

Published on

Oct 7, 2024

Advanced Threat Hunting: Key Techniques and Tools Explained

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Advanced threat hunting is about finding cyber threats before they can cause damage. Unlike traditional methods that rely on automated systems, threat hunting involves skilled analysts actively looking for hidden dangers. They dig through data, spot unusual patterns, and identify threats that might have been missed. This proactive approach helps organizations catch issues early and strengthen their overall security.

In this post, we'll explain advanced threat hunting, why it matters, and some of the key techniques and tools involved.

What is Advanced Threat Hunting?

Advanced threat hunting is not just a buzzword; it's a proactive approach to finding cyber threats before they can cause harm. Unlike traditional threat detection which relies on automated alerts, threat hunting requires skilled analysts to manually look for hidden threats that might have evaded initial detection. This is important because modern detection technology can't always keep up with the evolving tactics of sophisticated threat actors.

Advanced threat hunting mainly focuses on finding behavior indicators and uncovering hidden threats. Threat hunters analyze raw data from various sources to identify anomalies and patterns that indicate malicious activity. This is opposite to traditional detection which reacts to alerts instead of actively looking for threats. Proactive threat hunting reduces the damage by reducing the time between breach and discovery.

Threat hunting improves your organization's understanding of the threats so that you can improve your defenses and security posture. It moves the focus from just responding to alerts to actively looking for and mitigating advanced threats. This proactive approach helps you find threats before they hit the business and gives you valuable insights to improve your overall security.

Benefits of Advanced Threat Hunting

Advanced threat hunting offers numerous benefits to organizations, making it an indispensable part of modern cybersecurity strategies. Here are some key advantages:

Improved Incident Response: By enabling real-time detection and response to threats, advanced threat hunting significantly reduces the risk of breaches and minimizes the impact of attacks. This proactive approach ensures that potential threats are identified and mitigated before they can cause substantial harm.
Enhanced Security Posture: Identifying and addressing hidden threats strengthens an organization's overall security posture. By uncovering vulnerabilities that automated systems might miss, threat hunters can implement measures to prevent successful attacks, thereby fortifying the organization's defenses.
Increased Visibility: Advanced threat hunting provides a deeper understanding of an organization's network and systems. This increased visibility allows for the identification of potential vulnerabilities and the implementation of proactive measures to address them, ensuring a more secure environment.
Better Resource Allocation: By prioritizing threats based on their severity and potential impact, organizations can allocate resources more effectively. This ensures that the most critical threats are addressed first, optimizing the use of available resources and enhancing overall security.
Improved Compliance: Advanced threat hunting helps organizations meet regulatory requirements and industry standards. By ensuring that hidden threats are identified and addressed, organizations can reduce the risk of non-compliance and avoid associated penalties, thereby maintaining a strong compliance posture.

Threat Hunting Fundamentals

Threat hunting is a proactive approach to identifying and addressing threats within an organization's network and systems. Here are the fundamental aspects of threat hunting:

Understanding the Threat Landscape: Threat hunters must have a deep understanding of the threat landscape, including the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by attackers. This knowledge is crucial for anticipating potential threats and developing effective countermeasures.
Identifying Potential Vulnerabilities: A key aspect of threat hunting is the ability to identify potential vulnerabilities within an organization's network and systems. This includes recognizing weaknesses in software, hardware, and configuration that could be exploited by attackers.
Using Advanced Tools and Techniques: Threat hunters leverage advanced tools and techniques, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and threat hunting APIs, to identify and analyze threats. These technologies (including threat hunting frameworks) enable the detection of sophisticated threats that might evade traditional security measures.
Collaborating with Other Teams: Effective threat hunting requires collaboration with other teams, including incident response and security operations. By working together, these teams can ensure that threats are addressed promptly and effectively, enhancing the organization's overall security.
Continuously Monitoring and Improving: Threat hunting is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring and improvement. Threat hunters must stay up-to-date with the latest threats and techniques used by attackers, adapting their strategies to stay ahead of emerging threats.

By understanding and implementing these fundamentals, organizations can enhance their threat hunting capabilities and improve their overall security posture.

Components of Advanced Threat Hunting

Threat hunting has several key components, each is important in its own way. One of the most critical skills for threat hunters is data analytics and reporting so they can see patterns and communicate their findings. Sifting through massive amounts of raw data to find indicators of compromise and tactics used by the threat actors is key.

Threat hunting can be broken into two main approaches: structured and unstructured. Structured hunting uses predefined criteria and intelligence to look for specific threats or indicators of compromise. This is very effective when dealing with known threats and vulnerabilities.

Unstructured hunting lets analysts look for threats without predefined criteria, and focus on high-risk areas and entities that might indicate malicious activity. This flexibility is important for finding threats that don't fit the traditional patterns.

Behavioral analysis is another key component of advanced threat hunting. By examining deviations from normal user behavior, threat hunters can find threats that evade traditional security. This analysis method examines user and entity behavior over time and sets baselines of normal activity to detect anomalies that might indicate a security incident.

Cyber Threat Hunting with Hunt.io SQL

In the world of advanced threat hunting, SQL is a game-changer. Hunt.io's SQL allows you to craft precise, detailed queries that dig deep into your data to uncover hidden threats. With Hunt SQL, you can analyze network information and other raw data sources in ways that traditional security tools might miss. Whether you're identifying patterns of malicious activity or correlating events across multiple systems, SQL gives you the flexibility and power you need.

Why Hunt.io SQL is Essential for Advanced Threat Hunting

Hunt.io's SQL functionality stands out because it allows you to run advanced, customizable queries tailored to your specific environment. Here's how it boosts your threat-hunting capabilities:

Customizable Queries Across Multiple Datasets: Hunt SQL allows threat hunters, researchers, and analysts to write custom SQL queries across six specialized databases-HTTP data, malware, certificates, honeypot, open directories, and phishing-providing deep insights into attack patterns and threat actor activities.
Comprehensive Threat Data: With Hunt SQL, you can access first-party data related to malicious HTTP activity, confirmed command and control (C2) servers, phishing infrastructure, honeypot scanning activity, and malicious certificates. This broad dataset helps track threat actor TTPs and identify key indicators of compromise (IoCs).
Malware and C2 Analysis: Users can query the malware database, which contains 48 searchable fields on confirmed C2 servers, to build detailed statistics on malware activity, including insights into infrastructure and hosting patterns.
Pivoting on SSL Certificates: By querying the certificates database, analysts can track and identify malicious certificates used in attacks and build customized histories of SSL/TLS certificate activity for specific hosts.
Honeypot Scanning Detection: Hunt SQL enables users to explore honeypot data to discover scanning activity patterns, identify popular user agents used by scanners, and analyze ASN-level information to map where scans originate.
Advanced Open Directory Search: Threat hunters can use SQL queries to find files hosted on open directories, helping to uncover malware, exploits, and attack tooling that threat actors leave exposed.
Phishing Infrastructure Tracking: Hunt SQL provides detailed data on phishing sites, allowing analysts to query confirmed malicious URLs and monitor phishing kits and other tools used by attackers.
Historical Threat Analysis: By querying historical data from Hunt's datasets, users can build detailed statistics on malware family activity, identify popular hosting providers, and analyze changes in infrastructure over time.

Specific Use Cases of Hunt.io SQL in Action

Find Distinct IP/Port Pairs Hosting Cobalt Strike

Hunt users can run SQL queries against our C2 database to identify live command and control (C2) servers linked to Cobalt Strike. Users can filter by any monitored malware family and choose any data field pertinent to their research or specific use case.

SELECT  
    malware.name, ip, port  
FROM  
    malware  
WHERE  
    malware.name = 'Cobalt Strike'  
GROUP BY  
    malware.name, ip, port

Find IPs Hosting Multiple Malware Families to Spot Bulletproof Hosting

This query finds IP addresses hosting more than three malware families, assisting threat hunters in identifying potential bulletproof hosting providers facilitating malicious operations.

SELECT
    ip,
    COUNT(DISTINCT malware.name) AS malware_families
FROM
    malware
GROUP BY
    ip
HAVING
    COUNT(DISTINCT malware.name) > 3
ORDER BY
    malware_families DESC;

And there's much more. Head over to our recent blog post Announcing Hunt SQL where we dive deep into how Hunt SQL can assist with your threat hunting.

Advanced Hunting Techniques

Advanced hunting techniques are important to keep up with the ever-changing threat landscape. These can be broadly categorized into hypothesis-based and analytics-driven hunting. Hypothesis-based hunting uses prior knowledge and experience to formulate potential threats to investigate. This is useful when dealing with known threats or specific vulnerabilities.

Analytics-driven hunting uses advanced tools and data analytics to find patterns or anomalies that indicate security risks. This method uses multiple queries and behavioral analysis to get a full picture of the network and find potential threats.

Using Multiple Queries

Combining multiple queries is a powerful technique that improves detection by correlating different data points across the network. When threat hunters use multiple queries they can gather data from different sources, and get a broader view of potential threats. This holistic approach helps to find hidden patterns and anomalies that would be missed if you look at the data in isolation.

Correlating different data points improves network visibility and incident response. This approach not only detects advanced threats but also gives you a deeper understanding of the overall security posture of the network.

Behavioral Analysis

Behavioral analysis is key to finding sophisticated threats that evade traditional security. Anomaly detection systems play a big role in this by setting baselines of normal behavior and finding unusual activities that might indicate threats. Monitoring user and entity behavior over time allows threat hunters to detect abnormal behavior that might indicate a security incident.

Baselines need to be updated continuously to make these techniques effective. As threats evolve, so should the parameters of what is normal behavior. Being vigilant and adapting to new threat patterns allows threat hunters to detect and respond to advanced threats quickly.

Using Advanced Hunting Data for Incident Response

Using advanced hunting data is key to incident response and digital forensics. Several threat hunting tools allow threat hunters to define hypotheses based on multiple sources, including MITRE ATT&CK tactics and previous query results. This structured approach allows analysts to focus on specific threat behavior, so they can detect and mitigate potential incidents.

Analyzing threat hunting data will also help to determine the scope of the attack and new leads for further investigation. This will provide historical and real-time indicators of compromise (IOCs) that will enrich alerts and incidents, so you have more context for compromised systems post breach. Using advanced hunting data will improve incident response and protection against advanced threats.

Advanced Threat Hunting in Action

Advanced threat hunting techniques have the potential to play a crucial role across industries by proactively identifying and mitigating threats that may go undetected by traditional security measures.

In a healthcare setting, for instance, Hunt.io SQL could be leveraged to detect advanced persistent threats (APTs) that target sensitive patient data. By querying databases like Malware and Certificates, security teams can track suspicious certificates or Command and Control (C2) servers, identifying and neutralizing threats before they can cause significant harm.

Similarly, in the financial sector, Hunt.io SQL could be used to detect unauthorized access by querying HTTP and Honeypot data for anomalies in traffic. This can help identify malicious actors exploiting vulnerabilities in financial systems, enabling immediate action to prevent fraud or financial loss.

These examples show how advanced threat hunting not only detects threats but also mitigates threats that can have a big business impact. Integrating advanced threat hunting techniques will strengthen your security posture and response to emerging threats.

Wrapping up

Mastering advanced threat hunting techniques and tools is essential for staying ahead of cyber threats. By understanding these components and leveraging Hunt.io SQL, organizations can significantly enhance both their threat identification and mitigation capabilities.

To experience the full potential of advanced threat hunting with Hunt.io, book a demo today and discover how our platform can elevate your security strategies.