Introduction

In the ever-evolving cyberspace, new threats emerge daily. Therefore, it has become imperative to upgrade cybersecurity approaches from simple reactive measures to proactive threat hunting. This tutorial will guide you through the process of threat hunting in your corporate network, allowing you to detect hidden threats and respond promptly before substantial damage ensues.

Step 1: Understanding Your Network Baseline

Before you can hunt for anomalies, you need a clear view of the normal behavior of your network. With a deep knowledge on habitual user activities, communication patterns, result-oriented data flows and processes, you can distinguish normal from suspicious behaviors.

Step 2: Choosing and Configuring Your Threat Hunting Tools

Choose reliable tools for threat hunting. Ensure that your tool has capabilities for data aggregation, automated analysis, manual investigation, visualization, remediation, and reporting. After getting the right tools, configure them to align with your network's unique needs.

Step 3: Setting Your Hunting Hypotheses

Develop hypotheses based on top threats facing your industry, previous security incidents, emerging vulnerabilities, and threat intelligence reports.

Step 4: Running Your Hunt

Apply your hypotheses to run your hunt. Look out for discrepancies in user behavior, unusual data transfers, uncommon login times or locations, escalation of privileges, irregularities in system or device performance, and suspicious codes in your network.

Step 5: Analyzing Hunt Outputs

Review the findings from your hunt. Validate identified anomalies to confirm if they are threats. Also, evaluate your hunting process to improve your hypotheses and tool configuration. You can use a SWOT analysis to accomplish this.

Step 6: Containing and Eradicating Threats

Upon validation, promptly contain identified threats to prevent lateral movement within the network. Afterwards, completely eradicate the threats and recover affected systems or data.

Step 7: Post-Hunt Activities

After a successful hunt, document your findings, insights, actions, revisions, and recommendations for future hunts. Disseminate this knowledge with your team to enhance your organization's overall security posture.

Step 8: Automating Your Hunt

Once you've successfully run several manual hunts and refined your process, consider integrating your threat hunting with automation and machine learning for efficiency. This allows for continuous hunting and faster detection of threats.