Preface

Threat hunting is the act of assuming that an adversary is already inside your environment and that you have to proactively hunt for them before they can cause major damage to your business. Threat hunting is about proactively testing and enhancing your organization's defenses. The goal of this book is to help analysts out there, no matter their background, to get started with its practice.

This book provides an introduction for those who don't know much about the Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) and Threat Hunting (TH) worlds, but it also helps those with more advanced cybersecurity knowledge who want to implement a TH program from scratch.

The first section of the book tries to cover all the basics, helping you to understand what threat intelligence is and how can it be used, how to collect data and how to understand data through the development of data models, and also some basic networking and operating system concepts, with a look at some of the main TH data sources. The second section of the book covers how to set up a lab environment for TH purposes using open source tools, alongside how to plan a hunt with practical examples. The first practical exercises are small atomic hunts carried out leveraging Atomic Red Team, while the second part dives deeper into the hunting of advanced persistence threats using intelligence-driven hypotheses and the MITRE ATT&CK™ Framework.

Finally, the book closes with tips and tricks to assess data quality, document your hunts, define and select metrics to track your success, communicate a breach, and communicate TH results to executives.