CTI-driven Threat Hunting Exercises

Objective: Understand the concept of CTI-driven threat hunting and learn how to plan and conduct threat hunting exercises using cyber threat intelligence to proactively identify and mitigate potential threats in your environment.

Introduction: CTI-driven threat hunting is the proactive practice of using threat intelligence to guide the search for hidden or unknown threats within an organization's networks, systems, and endpoints. By leveraging CTI to inform and prioritize threat hunting efforts, security teams can more effectively detect and respond to advanced, evasive, or emerging threats that may evade traditional security controls.

Step 1: Define Threat Hunting Objectives and Scope

• Identify the specific objectives of your CTI-driven threat hunting exercise, such as detecting a particular type of threat, validating security controls, or investigating suspicious activities.

• Determine the scope of the exercise, including the systems, networks, and data sources to be examined.

• Align the objectives and scope with your organization's overall CTI and cybersecurity goals and priorities.

Step 2: Gather and Analyze Relevant Threat Intelligence

• Collect and analyze threat intelligence from various sources, such as open-source feeds, commercial providers, industry sharing groups, or internal CTI efforts.

• Focus on intelligence related to the specific objectives and scope of your threat hunting exercise, such as indicators of compromise (IOCs), tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), or threat actor profiles.

• Identify patterns, trends, and potential indicators that can guide your threat hunting efforts.

Step 3: Develop Threat Hunting Hypotheses

• Based on the gathered threat intelligence, develop hypotheses about potential threats or malicious activities that may be present in your environment.

• Formulate specific questions or scenarios that your threat hunting exercise aims to answer or investigate.

• Prioritize hypotheses based on their likelihood, potential impact, and alignment with your threat hunting objectives.

Step 4: Plan and Prepare Threat Hunting Activities

• Develop a detailed plan for your threat hunting exercise, including the specific steps, techniques, and tools to be used.

• Identify the data sources and systems to be inspected, such as log files, network traffic captures, endpoint data, or threat intelligence platforms.

• Prepare the necessary tools, scripts, or queries to extract, filter, and analyze the relevant data.

• Coordinate with relevant stakeholders and teams to ensure the availability and access to required resources and data.

Step 5: Execute Threat Hunting Exercises

• Conduct the planned threat hunting activities, following the defined steps and using the prepared tools and techniques.

• Perform targeted searches, queries, or investigations based on the developed hypotheses and threat intelligence insights.

• Analyze the collected data to identify any indicators, anomalies, or patterns that may suggest the presence of threats or malicious activities.

• Document and record any findings, observations, or insights gained during the threat hunting exercise.

Step 6: Investigate and Respond to Findings

• Triage and prioritize any identified threats or suspicious activities based on their potential impact and urgency.

• Conduct in-depth investigations to validate the findings and gather additional context and evidence.

• Initiate appropriate incident response procedures, such as containment, eradication, and recovery, for confirmed threats.

• Coordinate with relevant stakeholders and teams to ensure effective remediation and mitigation of identified threats.

Step 7: Document and Share Lessons Learned

• Document the results, insights, and lessons learned from the CTI-driven threat hunting exercise.

• Share the findings and recommendations with relevant stakeholders, including security teams, incident responders, and CTI analysts.

• Use the gained knowledge to refine and improve your CTI collection, analysis, and threat hunting processes.

• Incorporate the lessons learned into future threat hunting exercises and CTI-driven security efforts.

CTI-driven threat hunting is a powerful approach to proactively identify and mitigate hidden or emerging threats in your environment. By leveraging threat intelligence to guide and prioritize your threat hunting efforts, you can focus your resources on the most relevant and impactful areas, increasing the likelihood of detecting and responding to advanced or evasive threats.

Effective CTI-driven threat hunting requires a combination of robust threat intelligence collection and analysis, well-defined objectives and hypotheses, and skilled personnel equipped with the necessary tools and techniques. It is an iterative and continuous process that should be integrated into your organization's overall cybersecurity strategy and CTI program.

By regularly conducting CTI-driven threat hunting exercises, you can enhance your organization's ability to proactively identify and mitigate threats, improve your overall security posture, and stay ahead of evolving cyber threats. Remember to document and share the lessons learned from each exercise to continuously refine and strengthen your threat hunting capabilities.