Miami 2018

Welcome Threat Hunters, Phishermen, and Other Liars

• Rob Lee
• Monday, January 29th, 7:15pm - 9:15pm

Over the past few years, a new term has continually popped up in the IT Security community called "Threat Hunting." While the term seems like it is a new thing, it is the reason all of us joined IT Security in the first place. We "Find Evil." While I was at Mandiant and in the US Air Force, "Finding Evil" was our tagline while we were on engagements.

The concept and root idea of Threat Hunting is nothing new. When I first started in IT Security back in the late 90s, my job was to find threats in the network. This led to automated defenses such as Intrusion Detection Systems, monitoring egress points, logging technology, and monitoring the defensive perimeter hoping nothing would get in. Today, while the community is trying to identify intrusions, threat hunting has evolved to be something a bit more than the loose definition of "Find Evil" primarily due to the massive amount of incident response data currently collected about our attackers. This data has evolved into Cyber Threat Intelligence.

It is hard to simply "Go Find Evil" but if armed with a bit of CTI in the mix -or essentially what you might be looking for, or what your adversaries are likely interested in, it makes the hunt more targeted. These indicators are used to great effect when used properly and proactively against a threat group. Threat hunting has improved the accuracy of threat detection due to the fact that we can focus our searching on the adversaries exploiting our networks - Humans hunting humans. Even with knowing where to look, tools are now being introduced to help make hunting more practical across an enterprise.

This talk was put together to outline what exactly "Threat Hunting" means and will step you through exactly what threat hunting is and how it works.