Chapter 2: Hunting Concepts, Methodologies, and Techniques

Threat hunting is the combination of identifying adversary activity when automated defenses have either not detected malicious events or, more commonly, have not attributed events as being malicious.

Threat hunting commonly refers to the tactical benefit of, while I find this a lazy description, detecting "unknown unknowns." Isn't that the point of, well, everything? I don't think there are any professionals, irrespective of their vertical, that just want to do the "known knowns." While this book will focus primarily on levering the Elastic Stack to perform threat hunting, this chapter is intended to introduce threat hunting theory and concepts, to apply the proper mindset for threat hunting that will be put into practice throughout the book. This chapter, and this book, aren't intended to be an all-inclusive manual on threat hunting as a higher-level skill.

In this chapter, we'll...