In cyber security, threat hunting is the act of proactively searching and monitoring networks, systems, endpoints, datasets etc. to identify any malicious behaviours or patterns that are not detected by existing security tools.
If you haven’t already read the episode on process hunting, I recommend that you go back and do so, at least for a couple of my jokes, and to help keep our clicks/metrics up. Where that episode concentrated on tracking processes, this blog will concentrate on, you guessed it, pipes. And due to the depth I tried to go with this one, it has been split into a two-part series, so make sure to come back for the second part after you’ve finished this one.
In a previous blog I reviewed the foundational use case for a TIP, which is threat intelligence management—the practice of aggregating, analyzing, enriching and de-duplicating internal and external threat data in order to understand threats to your environment and share that data with a range of systems and users. However, one of the unique benefits of the ThreatQ Platform and where organizations are deriving additional business value, is that it also allows you to address other use cases.
If you’re like me, you’ve occasionally found yourself staring at the Splunk search bar trying to decide how best to analyze a series of data, iterating against one or more fields. If your brain gravitates towards traditional programming syntax, the first thing that pops into your mind may be application of a for or while loop (neither of which follow Turing convention in SPL). With commands like stats, streamstats, eventstats, or foreach at your disposal, which one should a hunter use?
Quite often you are in the middle of a security incident or just combing through your data looking for signs of malicious activity, and you will want to trace the activity or relationships of a particular process. This can be a very time-consuming and frustrating task if you try to brute force things (copying/pasting parent and child process IDs over and over again). And in the heat of battle, you may miss one item that could have led you to something interesting.
It’s no secret that cyber attacks are on the rise. Not only are they becoming more frequent, but the malicious actors who mount these attacks are constantly improving their skills and evolving the tools in their arsenals. Protecting your organization is challenging at best; especially since we measure the return on investment for cybersecurity as ‘preventing losses’ instead of ‘increasing revenue.’
