Threat Hunting
The release of Mandiant’s APT1 report provided information security professionals with a deep insight into one of the most experienced and prolific threat groups operating. The insight into the Chinese PLA Unit 61398 also provided context around these sophisticated threat actors. The term Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) became part of the information security lexicon. Information security and incident responders now had insight into threats that conducted their activities without detection, and over a significant period.
With the threat that APTs pose, coupled with the average time even moderately sophisticated groups can spend in a target network, organizations have started to move from passive detection and response to a more active approach, to identify potential threats in the network. This practice, called threat hunting, is a proactive process, whereby digital forensics techniques are used to conduct analysis on systems and network components to identify...