Technology

Crucial Features and Capabilities of a Threat Hunting Platform that Will Keep Your Network Safe

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A threat hunting platform is the linchpin of an effective threat hunting team and enterprise cyber defense strategy. However, not all platforms are created equal. It’s crucial to select a solution that meets specific requirements and offers the right mix of capabilities and features. That enables efficient investigation and discovery of threats in your environment, real-time security insights, proactive detection, and more actionable threat intelligence across your organization. To help you select the right one, we’ve outlined eight key features to look for when shopping around.

1. Integration with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

The threat hunting platform must integrate with your security information and event management (SIEM) solution. Without this feature, organizations will not be able to move data off the endpoint, effectively reducing their ability to do any deep hunting. Lack of integration will also make the correlation of findings with intelligence impossible, significantly impacting the success rate of your team’s work.

Integrating the platform with SIEM means that all relevant events from the environment are pulled into one system, enabling you to use that central repository as an indicator for finding malicious behavior in an enterprise network. The threat-hunting software should include the ability to collect and store log data from multiple sources to create a holistic view of an organization’s cybersecurity posture.

2. Ability to Provide Comprehensive Data Visibility

Today’s digital threat landscape requires more than just point solutions that identify targeted malware or hacking attempts. It’s imperative to have the proper data visibility, regardless of size or business vertical, so that organizations can make well-informed decisions. Some example use cases include:

  • Delivering situational awareness during an incident
  • Creating log reviews that scale across the organization
  • Capturing behavior anomalies to detect unknown threats
  • Conducting forensic investigations to find how attackers breached their defenses • Securing endpoints to prevent breaches

With this in mind, it is essential for security teams to invest in a platform that provides complete coverage from endpoint to cloud. An effective platform will provide deep visibility into all traffic flows on the network and be able to ingest vast amounts of data without affecting performance. For example, Sangfor Technologies provides the best platforms with machine learning algorithms suitable for anomaly detection while monitoring all behaviors on both devices and servers (file accesses, user accounts, etc.). In addition, they can deliver real-time alerts when suspicious activities are detected.

3. Centralized Dashboard

A centralized dashboard provides one convenient location to monitor all aspects of your security environment, including network, system application, and event logs; hardware devices; alerts; vulnerabilities, malware and malware hashes; threat intelligence data feeds. It also incorporates performance metrics demonstrating an organization’s cyber health and guiding specific remediation steps.

Security analysts should be able to quickly find the tools they need to respond at the moment and focus their time on hunting threats, not searching for information. Additionally, dashboards typically have additional integration points with other systems, such as ticketing systems or other IT infrastructure monitoring tools, so everything is accessible from one place.

4. Alert Automation

Automated processes are often too rigid and don’t consider human nuances; however, the best platforms allow analysts to review the workflow before it executes. An excellent threat-hunting platform needs to automate notifications but not drown the analyst in them – there must be a balance between manual investigation and automation.

Some tools offer visualization capabilities that make spotting threats easier for non-technical users with little experience in cybersecurity, making this type of platform valuable for enterprises with less tech-savvy staff. The need for such features is especially crucial when dealing with complex or unknown types of malware. In some cases, even white hat hackers may find themselves struggling to dissect sophisticated malware without some assistance from automated visualizations.

5. Metric visualization across multiple sources

Utilizing security data analytics software, such as those in Sangfor Technologies, is the first step toward creating your threat-hunting platform. For example, if you have a SIEM system that monitors many different logs and metrics from various sources, you can use that as one component of your research.

The threat hunting platform should help you to better understand attack patterns across heterogeneous systems. The more information you gather about cyber attacks, the easier it will be for you to spot vulnerabilities before any exploitation takes effect. Finally, a good hunting platform should also incorporate risk-scoring algorithms to distinguish false positives from legitimate threats not to overwhelm an analyst.

6. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) integration

A crucial feature and capability of the latest threat hunting platform are integrating with your EDR software so that all alerts can move to your SIEM (security information event management) for analysis. This integration allows you to follow up on potential false positives without additional scanning, data duplication, or resource wastage.

The use of machine learning and artificial intelligence is also crucial as it will provide near-real-time remediation capabilities and visibility into every alert from every layer of your network. Also, it’s essential to remember that a single platform cannot be everything for everyone. It must provide flexibility based on your security needs. So make sure the solution you choose is easy to configure and customize according to those needs.

7. Ability to Integrate with Modern IT Infrastructure

Any threat hunting platform must integrate with modern IT infrastructure such as SIEM, IDS/IPS, and log management solutions. That allows you to extract and parse raw logs to identify possible threats or anomalies within your network traffic. A good example would be the ability to extract JSON events from an Apache server and send those events directly into Splunk for further analysis.

The ultimate goal is to have a system that integrates seamlessly with other security tools so that when the hunt team identifies something interesting, they can escalate the alert accordingly. The data flow through these systems should be fast and efficient to minimize the time spent on low-value work. It’s more efficient to spend a few hours conducting manual research on one high-value anomaly than to spend several days parsing 500MB of data looking for particular signs of compromise.

Conclusion

Organizations and businesses are at a higher risk of data breaches than ever. So, it’s critical to protect yourself by adopting an end-to-end defense strategy from inside and outside your organization’s networks. Deploying network traffic analysis tools will help your business be more secure. A reliable threat hunting platform from an experienced company like Sangfor Technologies will enable an organization to hunt out threats automatically with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Consequently, they can tackle those threats before they cause damage. When the discovery process is complete, the team should have a detailed report of what happened during the hunt and mitigation strategies.

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