Trustwave's 2024 Financial Services Threat Reports Highlight Alarming Trends in Insider Threats & Phishing-as-a-Service. Learn More
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Trustwave's 2024 Financial Services Threat Reports Highlight Alarming Trends in Insider Threats & Phishing-as-a-Service. Learn More
As organizations learn that sophisticated attackers are dwelling unnoticed on their networks for months – or even years – on end, you may be seeing the need to move beyond basic threat prevention and become more proactive in identifying and eradicating threats.
With 83 days the median time between when attackers gain unauthorized access to victim networks and when incidents are first detected, according to the 2018 Trustwave Global Security Report, your adversaries are having ample time to cause real damage. But a defense activity known as threat hunting has emerged in recent years as a key way to counter that seemingly interminable window of time when intruders can operate untrammeled within your borders.
Threat hunting is broadly defined as the manual practice of applying tools, tactics, procedures and intelligence to uncover advanced network attacks that have slipped past existing defenses. Threat hunting’s growing popularity is, in part, because:
With more interest – and more vendors pushing threat hunting services – you should carefully consider when to invest in proactive threat hunting and how to go about doing the threat hunt. Let's look at some of the most common reasons for doing a proactive threat hunt. In a future article, we’ll talk about how to decide to do them using in-house or outsourced resources.
Sometimes the decision to invest in a threat hunt is easy. If you know your organization is breached, a reactive threat hunt may ensue, when incident responders look for the cause and extend of the breach. Determining when to invest money and resources proactively can be more difficult, though in the following situations, a proactive threat hunt is a security best practice.
Aside from finding unknown malicious actors or threats pestering across your IT infrastructure, threat hunting can also provide visibility into previously unknown weaknesses in your environment, such as outdated and vulnerable software, violations to policy, insider threats and unprotected databases. Finding and fixing any or all issues identified help increase security and reduce risk.
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