Threat hunting is a proactive cybersecurity defense activity that involves searching through networks, endpoints, and datasets to detect and isolate advanced threats that evade existing security solutions. It is becoming increasingly important as companies seek to stay ahead of the latest cyber threats and rapidly respond to any potential attacks. Threat hunting is based on the assumption that attackers are already inside an organizations network and are covertly monitoring and moving throughout it. Key features of threat hunting include:

• Proactivity: Threat hunting is a proactive approach to identifying previously unknown or ongoing non-malware threats.

• Manual and Automated Processes: Threat hunting has traditionally been a manual process, in which a security analyst sifts through various data information using their own knowledge and familiarity with the network to create hypotheses about potential threats. However, threat hunting can be partially automated or machine-assisted as well.

• Complementary to Incident Detection: Threat hunting is highly complementary to the standard process of incident detection, response, and remediation. As security technologies analyze the raw data to generate alerts, threat hunting is working in parallel to extract hunting leads out of the same data.

• Skilled Personnel: Threat hunters, or cybersecurity threat analysts, are highly skilled and dedicated personnel who combine a relentless aspiration to go on the offensive with intuitive problem-solving forensic capabilities to uncover and mitigate hidden threats.

Threat hunting involves going beyond what is already known or has been alerted to, and it is about venturing into the unknown to discover new cyber threats. Threat hunters look for attackers that get in under the radar, through vulnerabilities a company may not even know exists. Threat hunting investigations can be specific to each environment, but some techniques can be applied to almost any environment. Threat hunting is an essential component of any defense strategy, and it is becoming increasingly important as companies seek to stay ahead of the latest cyber threats and rapidly respond to any potential attacks.