CTI & SOC Team’s Compliment Holistic Threat Hunting
CTI & SOC Team’s Compliment Holistic Threat Hunting Activities & become part of Risk Mitigation that aligns with Cyber security framework of the organization.
A Proactive approach to Cybersecurity to identify potential attacks and module of attack and mitigate risk before they cause damage is how threat hunting works, searching constantly signs of malicious activity within a network, system, or organization to protect critical assets.
In this digital era Threat Hunting 2.0 is referred to leveraging AI and machine learning utilizing automation for threat hunting, as AI can also be even more successful in identifying patterns and outliers that indicate emerging threats.
As per Cyber crime statistics the cost of cybercrimes is projected to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025. It is said that 80% of reported cyber crimes are generally attributed to phishing attacks. At 16% phishing was the 2nd common reason for data breaches and the costliest averaging $ 4.91 million in breach costs.
(reference: https://www.getastra.com/)
Traditional threat hunting is more of reactive approach then proactive and include limitations as hackers are now use stealth attack and try to stay up with cutting edge techniques to load malware or design attacks that efficiently hide from security teams or somewhere near their networks to shoot their malware.
As per Picus Security, about 70% of recorded malware incidents utilize stealth-oriented techniques and this confirms how well resourced they are and traditional threat hunting requires entire security team to leave other task and check huge data sets which often lead to confusion identifying false positives or identifying something as a threat which was not a threat in first place.
The robust security posture in these condition required overhaul as CTI team find difficulty detecting a hacker’s process for infiltrating an organization, or indicators of compromise, analyzing multiple log sources simultaneously.
Proactive Threat Hunting is an expertise & mind game too
In Proactive threat hunting the cyber security team is working ahead of time or busy searching signs of any malicious activity within the organizations network. This also happens when threat analyst assume that hackers or attackers have already infiltrated the IT environment or systems.
IBM said in its research AI and automation in cybersecurity had a major impact on the speed of identification and containment of vulnerabilities. And this is what proactive threat hunting is when automation is used .Also the research found organization experienced lower data breach costs, saving $1.8 million as opposed to companies that didn’t deploy these measures.
Proactive threat hunting compliment’s SOC
SOC (security operations center) teams handle the intricacies such as creating security alerts risks relating to incident response team who are in position to escalate and mitigate ongoing threats.
The work of an SOC team is to offer key information and insight about threat detection and risk trends, perform vulnerability assessments including penetration testing. While SOC teams provide information in easy words and threat hunters who are mostly from CTI team.
In other words Cyberthreat intelligence (CTI) represents the information an organization gathers, analyzes about potential threats to cybersecurity and infrastructure. Cyberthreat intelligence is an essential component of an organization’s cyber resiliency, which includes “the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt” to threats, attacks, or compromises on systems, according to NIST.
Threat Hunting & Threat Intelligence
If we go by definition the simplest way to understand is proactive actions are part of Threat intelligence and that may include taking known Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and searching for them. The Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) team searches more deep and dark web and gathers information about potential attacks against an organization which provides with clear visibility to take right actions.
CTI teams mainly analyze the data and leverage it to mitigate the risk of attack. at any given activity and can be considered as threat hunting.
Here SOC team will assist by providing information to the threat hunting team and support them in tasks such as hunting malware or any incident. A planned threat hunting activity will provide understanding of infrastructure, reflect on different kinds of attacks and adversaries. This also include CTI teams ability to detect and monitor long-term trends with the help of several sources of data and logs variety.
Working holistically by CTI and SOC team sharing information openly, using the data found by the CTI team to create baselines simultaneously providing the SOC with feedback. The aim is to have strong communication between threat intelligence and SOC teams aligned to greater goals.
Cyber criminals if they have any structured method of threat to push, then defense line of organisations also demand a structure where identify a greater number of risk with threat hunting team is what required to create baseline. This will further ensure earlier detection of threats and by using behavioral analysis by threat hunters, malware detection is faster then before. The work of SOC team will be to improve incident response and have full focus on the incident giving greater insight to CTI team.
Cyber threat hunting services is therefor essential as a structured format for organization to deal with risk and threat patterns.
The list include
- Preparing for a Strong baseline by SOC and CTI team
- Developing a clear proposition for CTI team
- Covering all threat hunting activities within time frame
- Result validation must by SOC team
- Providing feedback and continue with Proactive threat hunting
- Training on AI and advanced techniques to cyber team
Importance of being Data driven in Threat Detection
When ever any cyberthreat detection or response program happen, it is always intelligence-driven data fueling the proactive defense posture of an organization and helping to better understand their cyber defense, address vulnerabilities, anticipate cyberthreats, focus resources on the most significant threats, and develop an incident response plan. This is done to minimize risk, saving the organization from reputational damage using wide range of tools for generating cyberthreat intelligence.
Conclusion:
It is high time to ensure that your organization, whether you’re in healthcare, finance, technology, or education is operating under safety net and this can happen when we conduct employee awareness classes and deploy cybersecurity testing tools.
We at IntruceptPvt Ltd provide a clear view and understanding, accelerate the prioritization process using orchestration and automation.
A security comprehensive suit at Intrucept offers include: SecureOps that provides security analysts and SOC managers a clear view across the organization, helping them fully understand the extent and context of an attack. It also simplifies workflows by automatically handling alerts, allowing for faster detection of both known and unknown threats.
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