Examine our research from the last year in the ReliaQuest 2024 Annual Cyber-Threat Report
Reduce Alert Noise and False Positives
Boost your team's productivity by cutting down alert noise and false positives.
Automate Security Operations
Boost efficiency, reduce burnout, and better manage risk through automation.
Dark Web Monitoring
Online protection tuned to the need of your business.
Maximize Existing Security Investments
Improve efficiencies from existing investments in security tools.
Beyond MDR
Move your security operations beyond the limitations of MDR.
Secure with Microsoft 365 E5
Boost the power of Microsoft 365 E5 security.
Secure Multi-Cloud Environments
Improve cloud security and overcome complexity across multi-cloud environments.
Secure Mergers and Acquisitions
Control cyber risk for business acquisitions and dispersed business units.
Operational Technology
Solve security operations challenges affecting critical operational technology (OT) infrastructure.
Force-Multiply Your Security Operations
Whether you’re just starting your security journey, need to up your game, or you’re not happy with an existing service, we can help you to achieve your security goals.
Detection Investigation Response
Modernize Detection, Investigation, Response with a Security Operations Platform.
Threat Hunting
Locate and eliminate lurking threats with ReliaQuest GreyMatter
Threat Intelligence
Find cyber threats that have evaded your defenses.
Model Index
Security metrics to manage and improve security operations.
Breach and Attack Simulation
GreyMatter Verify is ReliaQuest’s automated breach and attack simulation capability.
Digital Risk Protection
Continuous monitoring of open, deep, and dark web sources to identify threats.
Phishing Analyzer
GreyMatter Phishing Analyzer removes the abuse mailbox management by automating the DIR process for you.
Integration Partners
The GreyMatter cloud-native Open XDR platform integrates with a fast-growing number of market-leading technologies.
Unify and Optimize Your Security Operations
ReliaQuest GreyMatter is a security operations platform built on an open XDR architecture and designed to help security teams increase visibility, reduce complexity, and manage risk across their security tools, including on-premises, clouds, networks, and endpoints.
Blog
Company Blog
Case Studies
Brands of the world trust ReliaQuest to achieve their security goals.
Data Sheets
Learn how to achieve your security outcomes faster with ReliaQuest GreyMatter.
eBooks
The latest security trends and perspectives to help inform your security operations.
Industry Guides and Reports
The latest security research and industry reports.
Podcasts
Catch up on the latest cybersecurity podcasts, and mindset moments from our very own mental performance coaches.
Solution Briefs
A deep dive on how ReliaQuest GreyMatter addresses security challenges.
White Papers
The latest white papers focused on security operations strategy, technology & insight.
Videos
Current and future SOC trends presented by our security experts.
Events & Webinars
Explore all upcoming company events, in-person and on-demand webinars
ReliaQuest ResourceCenter
From prevention techniques to emerging security trends, our comprehensive library can arm you with the tools you need to improve your security posture.
Threat Research
Get the latest threat analysis from the ReliaQuest Threat Research Team. ReliaQuest ShadowTalk Weekly podcast featuring discussions on the latest cybersecurity news and threat research.
Shadow Talk
ReliaQuest's ShadowTalk is a weekly podcast featuring discussions on the latest cybersecurity news and threat research. ShadowTalk's hosts come from threat intelligence, threat hunting, security research, and leadership backgrounds providing practical perspectives on the week's top cybersecurity stories.
March 26, 2024
About ReliaQuest
We bring our best attitude, energy and effort to everything we do, every day, to make security possible.
Leadership
Security is a team sport.
No Show Dogs Podcast
Mental Performance Coaches Derin McMains and Dr. Nicole Detling interview world-class performers across multiple industries.
Make It Possible
Make It Possible reflects our focus on bringing cybersecurity awareness to our communities and enabling the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.
Careers
Join our world-class team.
Press and Media Coverage
ReliaQuest newsroom covering the latest press release and media coverage.
Become a Channel Partner
When you partner with ReliaQuest, you help deliver world-class cybersecurity solutions.
Contact Us
How can we help you?
A Mindset Like No Other in the Industry
Many companies tout their cultures; at ReliaQuest, we share a mindset. We focus on four values every day to make security possible: being accountable, helpful, adaptable, and focused. These values drive development of our platform, relationships with our customers and partners, and further the ReliaQuest promise of security confidence across our customers and our own teams.
More results...
Do you and your team want to start proactively threat hunting in your environment?
If so, it’s time to dive into the threat hunting steps below, starting with performing research on what you want to hunt for before digging into the data. It can be tempting for security teams to want to dive right in without a plan and instead start ad-hoc threat hunting. According to the SANS 2020 Threat Hunting Survey, almost half (45%) of respondents run an ad hoc hunting process that is dependent on their needs. However, this often leads to hours or even days wasted chasing down loose ends.
We have experienced it ourselves! Through multiple iterations of building out our threat hunting team and capabilities – across numerous industries and environments – we’ve continually refined and matured the process. Now, we’d like to share our lessons learned and steps that you can use as a base to build your own threat hunts.
At ReliaQuest, we follow these threat hunting steps when building a new threat hunting plan:
It’s important to identify the right people to do hunting in your environment. You can have new members perform hunting, but they will need a more defined process. We suggest having a team that is familiar with how an attacker thinks and to have a threat centric mindset when hunting in the environment. Typically, someone that has been an analyst for 2-3 years will be able to have an efficient approach to threat hunting.
What we have seen is that most organizations only have around five hours to really dedicate towards a threat hunt. However, we typically spend anywhere from 10 to 30 hours performing hunts. Due to the time commitment, we’d recommend building a hunt that can be accomplished in 10 hours – this way, your team member(s) performing threat hunts can accomplish more in their busy schedule. Finding one good take away, whether a hygiene fix or a threat, is a successful hunt (avoid boiling the ocean).
Common Pitfall: Some teams spend time over-analyzing threat hunts instead of focusing on key findings. It’s better to identify five actionable items versus a lengthy report that will fall to the wayside. The analyst in you will want to detail out every finding; however, in order to maximize your threat hunts, it’s important to take a step back and identify the most impactful findings.
This document should explain what you are looking for overall and you should be able to tie multiple objectives to it. We typically recommend starting with a baseline hunt, then moving to a threat-based hunt. It’s important to identify what’s normal and any potential hygiene issues or logging gaps before hunting down threats. A good way to plan out hunts once you have a solid baseline would be reviewing gaps that your threat detection content can’t or won’t cover – these can be aligned with threat groups that target your industry.
Common Pitfall: Teams to want to dig into advanced TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) before understanding what’s normal. For the most effective threat hunts, we recommend starting small and building up to that level of threat hunting.
The objectives are what you look for during your hunt. These should align to your high-level mission and include technical documentation on the how.
Start by mapping the objectives to a framework such as MITRE ATT&CK or the Cyber Kill Chain. Mapping the objectives in this way enables you to cover more gaps that your alerts or detections are missing. It also sets the foundation for a structured approach on coverage. Let’s take a look at an example for threat hunting using DNS queries:
DNS Query: MITRE T1048 & T1094
Note if the objective is hygiene or threat related for tracking purposes. This way, you can prioritize your goals for the threat hunt and set up multiple levels per objective if needed. Following the same DNS query example from above, this could look like:
Logging! Know what log sources and the type of logging you may need for the objective. This is a common pitfall for threat hunting teams. By identifying the required log sources first, you won’t waste time threat hunting for something that you have no visibility into.
To learn more, check out the Threat Hunting Use Case Blog series, or get the white paper: Threat Hunting 101.
Following the steps above, your team will be ready to build a foundational threat hunting plan that can be repeated, scaled, and refined over time. At ReliaQuest, we take our threat hunts a few steps further using GreyMatter, the security operations platform.
1. Standardized Queries. Part of the research and development process is creating queries that will automatically run against all available technologies and pull back the relevant data for the threat hunt. Within GreyMatter, it’s easy to select the hunt campaign you are looking for and load the query so that the hunt is ready to go. You can also modify the campaigns on the fly if you want to exclude or include items, such as adding a list of executive users that you want to target for the hunt.
2. Create customized dashboards on the data set. Through ReliaQuest GreyMatter, the data is visualized in dashboards so that it is repeatable and easy to find the answers to the objectives. This also provides an easy way to get screen shots around findings for documentation. Below are some screen shots from GreyMatter that illustrate how important and efficient visualizations are when cyber threat hunting.
3. Machine Learning! GreyMatter leverages machine learning algorithms. This helps identify abnormal activity and provides sample data sets to see how accurate the models are. All of these are battle-tested in our own environment.
With GreyMatter, proactively identify threats with click-and-go threat hunting. ReliaQuest customers have access to machine learning, threat hunting dashboards, and guided hunt campaigns, as well as custom-developed queries that pull your target data set.
Learn more about ReliaQuest GreyMatter.