Hunt teams: Still a good idea

The following is a guest post by a 2016 Secure360 Twin Cities Platinum Sponsor AristotleInsight.

Hunt Teams — not a new concept to cyber security, though not well known — are groups of cyber investigators that actively seek out threats on a network. What makes Hunt Teams unique is their personal approach to cyber security. Hunt Teams strive to identify anomalies and uncover historic patterns in data to stay ahead of cyber criminals and mitigate threats. While Hunt Teams play a vital role in enforcing cyber security, most of the time these teams operate without the luxury of automated tools that collect, organize, and store the data they need.

Hunt Teams are handicapped by mountains of siloed data. Team members must sort through this data to solve security problems, replicate bugs, and secure vulnerabilities in code, all while documenting their workflow at a highly granular level so that queries can be repeated if need be.

The existing workflow for Hunt Teams is highly task-oriented and inefficient. To truly be successful — to efficiently detect, identify, and understand advanced and persistent threats — Team members need the correlating security metrics to be presented consistently and automatically so they can quickly parse data and identify anomalies.

Big Data Security Analytics solutions capable of providing these metrics need to be able to collect, organize, store, analyze, and visualize them automatically to save Hunt Team members valuable time. With a more efficient workflow, Team members have the time they need to actively seek out threats.

Hunt teams and compliance frameworks

Hunt Teams do not work alone; a strong security posture also requires the help of a compliance team. Compliance frameworks lay out a best practice for cyber security, instead of a needless burden that complicates workflow. When Hunt Teams can use compliance frameworks, they can easily improve the overall security posture of an organization.

The ability to map regulations to security metrics and security metrics to regulations allows Hunt Team members to prove compliance at a glance. Without such mapping technology, Hunt Team members must take the time to gather, organize, and store the necessary metrics each time they need to prove compliance. As a result, Team members spend time on compliance that could be put to better use elsewhere.

When security professionals can rely on a sophisticated software to automatically prove regulation compliance, instead of doing it themselves, individual Hunt Team members can quickly get to work identifying and mitigating potential threats.

Hunt teams and documentation

Documentation is a necessity for Hunt Teams to work. After all, without the rigorous workflow and documentation, Hunt Teams may find themselves unable to repeat a particular task if the need arises. Yet writing documentation takes a significant amount of time.

With the help of a Big Data Security Analytics solution capable of automating the FBI’s Cyber Intelligence Cycle, Hunt Teams are now able to create repeatable processes instead of manually doing everything time and again. By setting up repeat processes that can run on-demand, Hunt Teams are capable of increased efficiency and accuracy when seeking out potential threats on the network.

The software collects all the information, displays it at a glance in an intuitive interface, and allows Hunt Teams to easily draw conclusions, identify anomalies, and run reports. This helps hunters make decisions quickly, and get to work hunting their prey, instead of getting bogged down in due-care or due-diligence.

New software helps hunt teams work efficiently

Now the FBI’s Cyber Intelligence Cycle has been automated using a solution that is capable of collecting, organizing, and storing data from an entire network. The implications for Hunt Teams are remarkable.

Hunt Team members rely on data from users, devices, applications, processes, and endpoints to detect, identify, and remediate threats. The fact that this data has historically been siloed negatively impacts the Hunt Team’s workflow and progress. When the collection, organization, storage, analysis, and visualization of security metrics are automated through a single-pane software solution, Hunt Teams can quickly see all the information they need at a glance. As a result of greater transparency, they have more time to actively seek out threats and APTs, increasing their efficiency and accuracy in the process.

If Hunt Teams are a new concept for your security team, it’s never too late to get familiar with their workflow, deliverables, and core needs. Hunt Teams have proven to be a valuable tool for enterprise security teams through their offensive approach to deterring cyber criminals.

No matter what size your organization, you can start your own Hunt Team. Doing so will improve your security posture almost immediately. The process of developing a Hunt Team is as easy as simply dedicating a few hours a month for your security team members to identify some anomalies on your network and dig into the cause of them.

Sergeant Laboratories’ flagship solution AristotleInsight, is a tool capable of unobtrusively doing the heavy lifting of collecting, organizing, and first pass analysis of security data. AristotleInsight is the only single-pane Hunt Team solution that is coupled with the metrics needed to maintain an analytics based security posture. Learn more about Sergeant Laboratories and AristotleInsight.