Bootstrap And Jumpstart Your Threat Hunting Program

oday’s threat actors are adaptable, tenacious, and opportunistic.  The range and diversification of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) at their disposal affords a degree of agility not easily countered.  Upon evading organization’s defenses, these nefarious individuals stealthily persist within a network for months—quietly collecting a myriad of confidential information; all-the-while, continuously evolving and moving laterally across the victim’s environment.

The Need for Threat Hunting

In order to launch a viable defense against this ever-advancing and highly motivated army of threat actors, cyber security professionals need to evolve beyond the fortress mentality, acknowledge the omnipresent nature of insider threats, and operate with the understanding that an adversary has already established a foothold within their protected boundary and are operating freely.  By proactively looking for indicators of compromise, malicious activity that would otherwise go undetected by modern signature-based detection tools can be surfaced.  When combined with a process to incorporate these indicators into existing monitoring and detection capabilities, this ‘Threat Hunting’ may significantly reduce the attack surface and vectors, optimizing cyber spend. A survey by CyberSecurity Insiders and Alert Logic showed 91% of organizations with threat hunting see improvements in speed and accuracy of incident response.

The Challenge with Threat Hunting

Unfortunately, the cold truth is that the resources required to operationalize proactive security is out of reach for most companies, especially in today’s harsh economic reality.  Investigations and associated research activities require a myriad of multi-disciplined analysts sift through a tsunami of log data using ill-suited tools or custom built one-off solutions that are cumbersome and costly to maintain.  In addition, in an ever-evolving threat landscape and abundance of proprietary technical solutions, it’s easy for intelligence analysts to become distracted by a flood of incoming information and security alerts while struggling to monitor a myriad of complex applications.  

With tightening resources, from teams working remotely to shrinking budgets, leveraging the odds via cyber threat intelligence to mitigate risks becomes key.  Optimizing threat intelligence means leveraging it as a force-multiplier to bridge the operational risk and security risk divide.  This requires pushing refinement and enrichment to the tactical edge, empowering operators with intelligent no-code tools, where they can easily transform data.  Operators must move fast in order to meet operational demands and disrupt threats.  However, the lack of user friendly, low-training solutions for quick exploration and threat intelligence fusion that operates at scale severely inhibits the adoption and implementation of threat hunting programs.

Bootstrap and Jumpstart with Gigasheet

While Excel-like tools aid business users, and complex log management systems like Splunk or ELK are designed for operations, security teams can benefit significantly from no-code, low-training solutions for quick exploration and analysis tools built for investigation.  Gigasheet offers a patent-pending, browser-based security analyst workbench to speed analysis of cyber threat indicators.  The spreadsheet-like interface means no protracted training is required, but unlike typical spreadsheets, the system recognizes indicators of compromise, offers intelligent security analytics and scales to billions of rows of data.

Gigasheet is a no-code, cybersecurity analyst workbench that allows analysts to be more efficient in security investigations without requiring additional skills or infrastructure.  Organizations can avoid the search for non-existent “unicorn” analysts, those rare individuals who can code, manage databases, and perform data science tasks.  With Gigasheet, security teams can decrease their dependence on IT infrastructure, systems administrators, and data science teams.  On the surface, Gigasheet is a web-based, billion row spreadsheet – but behind the scenes it offers a high performance big data analytics platform.

To learn more about how Gigasheet can jumpstart your new, or optimize your existing, threat hunting program contact us, or opt in to our beta to try it for yourself.