Forming the malware beaconing threat hunting hypothesis

As we discussed in the previous chapter, threat hunting exercises are geared around hypotheses. Typically, hypotheses follow or reflect a discovered security incident or some form of an alert from an automated security monitoring system or a finding from a security analyst. The threat hunting exercise we will be performing in this chapter works a bit differently, as the environment we are going to perform threat hunting activities on is unfamiliar or new to us. For example, our company purchased a new production plant with an existing ICS network infrastructure they are looking to tie to the existing company infrastructure, and we want to make sure that is safe to do. Another scenario would be when you have run your ICS network for ages but never seriously looked at the state of its security posture; in this case, these unprovoked types of threat hunting exercises can quickly and accurately give you an idea of malicious activity...