Attackers may be in your network right now. It sometimes takes weeks or months for an organization to detect a compromise while the attacker takes his or her time conducting recon on your network, spreading to different endpoints and servers, and identifying the most valuable data to steal. Threat hunting helps you find and stop the attack while it’s still just a compromise–before your data is stolen and you end up in the headlines as the next big data breach.
Is your network secure right now? Have any of your PCs or mobile devices been compromised? Before you even attempt to answer these questions, you need to pause and ask yourself: Can you actually answer either of these questions with any degree of certainty? Think hard about that one—because your job may depend on it.
According to the recent Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), the average time it takes for an organization to detect a compromise or to discover an attacker inside its network is measured in months—and sometimes years—rather than hours or minutes. With many of the major data breaches in recent years, the company found out about the attack the hard way—with a phone call from a credit card merchant or the FBI reporting stolen customer data being exposed or used in the wild.
The traditional security model is no longer working
The problem is a function of the traditional approach to security. The standard model employed by most organizations for the last decade or more is broken, and it’s time for a new strategy that focuses less on prevention. You need to look at security through a lens of shortening that time to detect a compromise and actively hunting for threats.
It isn’t really a secret that the perimeter is dead. The concept of “inside the network” and “outside the network” and the idea that you can protect your network and data by simply keeping the bad guys out has been an outdated strategy for some time now. The explosion of mobile devices and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) programs and the rise of cloud services have effectively removed whatever wall might have previously existed between your network and the bad guys.
The threat landscape has changed
Even if that was not the case, the reality is that the threat landscape shifted as well. While organizations were busy trying to harden the network perimeter, cyber espionage malware attacks like Stuxnet, Flame, and Duqu were silently spreading … undetected. While IT admins have been busy looking for unauthorized access and trying to keep the bad guys out, the attackers have been stealing credentials and logging in with valid usernames and passwords.
Read the full story on the Tenable blog: Finding Threats on Your Network: Hunt or Be Hunted.
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