Threat hunters don’t have to accept that false positives are simply part of doing business; by employing cutting-edge intelligence and tools that offer context-aware analysis they can reduce them significantly.
Imagine a world in which teams no longer had to spend their time sorting through piles of false alerts. Hunters could offer an advanced mechanism which automatically evaluates threat intel feeds and removes known benign IoCs from consideration, helping teams reduce false positives by around 98%.
1. Use a centralized repository for logs
Threat hunting is a process in which security teams use full-time to find and respond to advanced cyber threats that bypass standard detection technologies, like next-gen firewalls, antivirus software and endpoint detection and response platforms. It is vital for security teams as sophisticated cyberattacks may hide in plain sight and avoid tools designed only to detect known malware or attacks.
To maximize the efficacy of this approach, threat hunters need a complete and in-depth knowledge of their environment – which means having access to all relevant data and context from sources like logs, IoCs, alerts and threat intelligence – quickly and efficiently.
Utilizing a central repository to house all this data makes searching, filtering and analyzing easier. This can reduce false positives that consume security analyst time and resources; additionally, by entering harmless data into an internal whitelist you can remove it from view and allow your team to focus on real indicators that could indicate threats.
False positives can be an extremely costly problem, leading to security incidents which put your entire network at risk and diverting valuable resources away from other activities. They also cause confusion in assessing risks and threats and hinder future collaboration among security teams and the use of security tools.
Threat hunting is often misunderstood as an activity to identify threats by catching them in the act. Unfortunately, this assumption can be dangerous since most incidents are detected via automated security technology such as SIEM and MDR; while these systems should detect anomalies or threats within your system, sometimes these systems fail due to incorrectly labeled indicators or lack of contextual understanding.
Threat hunters are an essential component of any incident response team, as they have the skills and tools needed to detect anomalies that might indicate attacks. By being aware of their environment and having this knowledge at their fingertips, threat hunters can quickly and efficiently investigate these anomalies to ascertain if they are malicious in nature or not.
2. Use a context-aware approach
At the core of an effective threat hunting program lies its success – prioritizing relevant security incidents to save both time and resources in examining irrelevant data or alerts, so as to more effectively detect dangerous threats within your environment that would otherwise slip past traditional automated security systems. Doing this also allows for detection of more sophisticated attacks which might otherwise go undetected by more conventional security systems.
Adopting a contextual approach to threat hunting can also reduce false positives. This involves using threat intelligence, log data and security alerts to detect patterns of behavior that suggest malicious threats are present in order to determine whether activity is likely benign or malicious and take appropriate measures accordingly.
To be effective, context-aware security techniques must be combined with other security tools and technologies. This approach will allow you to rapidly identify threats and take proactive steps against them; furthermore, it will give you a greater insight into the context of your network, providing additional opportunities to enhance security practices.
Microsoft Defender for Identity provides an effective and advanced hunting capability that enables organizations to analyze and correlate data across their enterprise to perform advanced hunting activities, helping you assess incidents more thoroughly, identify affected devices/users more quickly, as well as gain visibility into any ongoing threats or incidents.
Threat hunters aim to detect and stop breaches days, weeks, or even months in advance of them being detected by traditional automated security systems. By engaging in proactive managed threat hunting activities, attackers can be identified before they plan a coordinated data exfiltration operation that could cause a mega breach.
To achieve this goal, threat hunters must quickly sort through large volumes of benign data with predictable patterns that follow predictable cycles within short timeframes. To make their search efficient and cognitively manageable, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques may assist them. By filtering harmless or predictable data with predictive patterns out, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques reduce analysis required from humans thus helping security specialists prioritize and remediate threats faster in their environments.
3. Invest in the right tools
Threat hunting tools help analysts detect and investigate suspicious activity that might indicate a covert attack. To achieve this objective, threat hunters need to have access to rich contextual information about both their environment and attackers in order to understand why these individuals make certain decisions or attempt attacks in particular ways – so as to find ways to stop their progression.
Cyber intelligence and threat hunting tools offer a solution. A combination of data analysis and forensics capabilities can reduce false positives while shortening detection times of advanced attacks.
Most sophisticated threat hunting programs employ a structured methodology that is intended to minimize biases and assumptions from impacting results. These methodologies utilize scientific inquiry techniques that consider all evidence before reaching a decision. Threat hunters relying on such goals as well as frameworks are then able to measure success, report findings to incident responders, and incorporate what was learned into an organization’s automated alerting infrastructure.
Of course, threat hunting can be conducted ad-hoc; however, for maximum effectiveness it’s best to establish a threat hunting framework across your organization that can be standardised across it all. A great place to start would be using MITRE’s ATTACK framework, which contains hundreds of adversarial tactics and techniques in one open-source, publicly accessible knowledgebase.
Threat hunters need a tool capable of sorting through large amounts of data quickly. A security analytics platform should help them sift through massive volumes, correlating and displaying indicators of compromise (IOCs) such as device/application types, traffic/network volume/volume IP addresses. In addition, this platform should provide quick recall capability from hybrid environments for further investigation of any hidden threats that might exist within.
As cyberattackers become more sophisticated and target organizations or even states, it is increasingly critical that cybersecurity teams possess the tools needed to detect and respond swiftly to any attacks that arise – otherwise companies risk incurring millions in losses, according to reports such as 2023 Cost of Data Breach Report which shows attacks which take longer to detect are among the costliest to deal with.
4. Train your team
Many cybersecurity teams struggle to assemble the necessary skillset for effective threat hunting, which can be an inherently complex and time-consuming process that may divert resources away from more urgent priorities. Yet organizations should invest in threat hunting despite these difficulties as this helps decrease false positives while strengthening overall security posture of an organization.
Threat hunting can be difficult to define; according to experts, it refers to any manual or machine-assisted process for finding security incidents missed by automated detection systems. Other experts define it as the set of activities performed by teams of people to detect and investigate malicious activity; either way, training your team on how to perform these actions effectively is key for success.
Threat hunters should always have a clearly-stated objective and goal in mind for each hunt. Allocate sufficient time, and be aware that finding supporting evidence can take some time; having multiple security tools installed helps facilitate this process – just ensure all share identical underlying data.
As security data increases, human teams find sifting through alerts increasingly challenging. This leads to an abundance of false positives which may demoralize and change their threshold for what constitutes valid alerts, eventually having an adverse impact on both effectiveness of security tools as well as investigations.
Threat hunters must look out for anomalies within their security data in order to reduce false positives, as this will allow them to quickly identify specific behavior that generated an alert and identify risky activities more rapidly. They should search for patterns of attack – or tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) such as initial access, privilege escalation, credential access or lateral movement to meet their goals more quickly. Doing this may allow them to quickly pinpoint specific behaviors generating the alert as well as quickly detect potentially risky ones.
False positives are unavoidable when hunting threats, but they don’t need to become an endless drain on your SOC resources. By employing context-aware analysis and centralised logs, your team can reduce the number of false positives it must verify each day.
