Unleash Your Inner Detective: 7 Tips to Become a Top-Notch Threat Hunter and Outsmart Cybercriminals!

In today’s digital age, businesses face the constant threat of cyber attacks, phishing scams, and hacking attempts. Hackers are always looking for vulnerabilities to exploit and steal sensitive data, and it’s essential to stay one step ahead of them. To do that, you need to become a top-notch threat hunter and unleash your inner detective. Here are seven tips to help you do just that:

1. Stay Up-to-Date With the Latest Threats

The first thing you need to do is stay informed about the latest threats and attack methods. Follow cybersecurity blogs, subscribe to industry newsletters, and attend conferences and training sessions. This will give you a better understanding of the current threat landscape and help you prepare for potential attacks.

2. Use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are powerful tools that can help you detect threats and anomalies in your network. They can analyze large volumes of data and identify patterns that humans might miss, allowing you to respond quickly and effectively.

3. Monitor Your Network

Continuous network monitoring is essential to detect and respond to threats in real-time. Use tools that can monitor network traffic, system logs, and user activity. This will help you spot anomalies and suspicious behavior that could indicate a cyber attack.

4. Conduct Regular Vulnerability Scans

Vulnerability scans can help you identify weaknesses in your network and applications that could be exploited by hackers. Conduct these scans regularly and prioritize the identified vulnerabilities based on their severity.

5. Create an Incident Response Plan

An incident response plan outlines the steps you will take in the event of a cyber attack. It should include procedures for identifying the source of the attack, containing the damage, and reporting the incident to the relevant authorities. Test your plan regularly to ensure it’s effective and up-to-date.

6. Train Your Staff

Human error is one of the most significant risks to cybersecurity. Train your staff on how to identify and report suspicious behavior, how to use security tools and software, and best practices for password management.

7. Use Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security to your login process. It requires users to provide more than one form of authentication, such as a password and a security token or a fingerprint. This makes it much harder for hackers to access your systems and data.

In conclusion, becoming a top-notch threat hunter requires staying informed on the latest threats, using cutting-edge technology, monitoring your network, creating an incident response plan, training your staff, and using multi-factor authentication. By following these tips, you can outsmart cybercriminals and keep your systems and data secure.

As cybercriminals’ methods and tools evolve, attack techniques are constantly updated and systematically employed to detect every weakness in cybersecurity. It is particularly important to understand that even the best-laid security countermeasures, based on current security solutions, cannot ensure 100% protection. There is always the chance a vulnerability will remain undetected for many years — such as Meltdown and Spectre, a design flaw in most modern processors that could be exploited to gain unauthorized access to data.

That is where threat hunting comes in. Based on the premise that no system is fully secure, threat hunting assumes an advanced threat may have already slipped by existing security solutions; therefore, the best course of action is proactively searching corporate network and assets in order to detect and isolate the attacker. While a significant part of the threat hunting process must be done with the help of technology (e.g. a SIEM solution), it cannot be fully automated. In fact, hunting is highly dependent on the hunter’s level of expertise. In a traditional security approach for detecting threats, it is quite usual to start by deploying a technology and then have experts who are trying to get the most out of it. With threat hunting, it’s the other way around: you start with people, the threat hunters, and then use technology to get the most out of their abilities. So, how does a security professional become a master threat hunter? What are the fundamental skills to face one of the most challenging cybersecurity fields and ensure no threat goes undetected? Let’s find out!

The 5 Essential Skills of a Master Threat Hunter

Expert hunters are highly-skilled professionals with an extensive experience and a deep understand of the tools of the trade, such as firewall logs, windows logs, attack techniques, intrusion detection systems and security incident and event management (SIEM). Some skills are considered essential for an effective threat hunter, including:

1. Pattern Recognition

Hackers are constantly developing new attack techniques, including unconventional ways of exploiting any sort of vulnerability and gaining unauthorized access. In many cases, there is no signature for these new zero-day attacks, so the hunter must be able to identify patterns that match these techniques. An effective threat hunter must be able to spot unusual patterns on the network and confirm if it is a false positive or an advanced malware trying to communicate with an external party. Some level of deductive reasoning is also vital, as hunters must be able to formulate reasonable hypotheses (e.g. how a threat would evade an IDS and exfiltrate specific data) and work backwards to look for traces of a possible ongoing intrusion.

2. Data Analytics

The most basic threat-hunting tool is data. Hunters are expected to not only know where to collect meaningful data, but how to perform data analytics. This includes using data science approaches, tools and techniques. For instance, a hunter may use data collected with an SIEM tool to create custom charts, based on their hypothesis, that will help in recognizing patterns more easily.

3. Malware Analysis

Finding the threat is just the first part of the job. Hunters are expected to dig in and gather detailed information on malware, including how it was delivered, its capabilities, how it spreads, and what sorts of damage it may cause. In order to do so, hunters must use advanced malware analysis techniques, including reverse-engineering malware code.

4. Data Forensics

The hunt is not limited to the piece of malware that was just found. In most cases, it will be necessary to analyze the affected hosts (both endpoints and servers) to have a complete picture of the damage caused by the threat. Hunters must know how to adequately collect, handle and analyze the evidence that will prove (or disprove) the hypothesis they are working on.

5. Communication

Being able to effectively communicate on all levels is an essential soft skill for a threat hunter. Any identified threat must be communicated to the appropriate parties. Doing it properly is quite different from just sending an email saying “Hi! I found a new threat that could jeopardize our entire company operation, please apply the attached fix and reboot all our servers immediately.” Remember, communications are not necessarily limited to the technical staff. In fact, it is likely the hunter is trying to validate their hypothesis in order to answer a question from the strategic level, most probably from the CISO or CIO. Hunters must know how to communicate clearly and concisely: not only in technical terms, but also in explaining, from a strategic risk-based approach, how a threat that has been identified is affecting the business and its possible impacts.

Conclusion

Becoming an expert threat hunter will not happen will not happen overnight. Most successful hunters developed their skills over years, gaining practical experience in several cybersecurity fields. As expected, these professionals are quite rare in the market, have excellent salaries, and are in constant high demand by the many companies that want to ensure the protection of their operations. Hunters must also have lots of patience and focus, as crunching and analyzing data for several hours can become quite tiresome. It would not come as a surprise if most threat hunters have also spent quite some time doing meditation and yoga! In the end, the best way to become a threat hunter is planning ahead. There is no shortage of training on areas such as malware analysis, forensics, incident response, pentesting or any other discipline required to become a hunter. Combining that with practical experience gained on the job or in a custom-testing environment can be of immense value in preparing you for one of the most difficult and specialized cybersecurity positions.