Today’s enterprise networks are heterogeneous, have multiple entry points, integrate with cloud-based applications, offer data center delivered services, include applications that run at the edge of the network, and generate massive amounts of transactional data. In effect, enterprise networks have become larger, more complex, and more difficult to secure and manage.

Security and IT teams may be loathe to admit it, but security has historically been mostly a reactive affair. Security engineers monitored for threats and responded when they detected one. They may have also taken steps to harden their systems against breaches, but they didn’t proactively fight the threats themselves. That is changing as more and more teams add threat hunting as one pillar of their cybersecurity strategies.

Threat hunting is emerging as a must-have addition to cybersecurity strategies. By enabling organizations to find and mitigate threats before they ever touch their networks or systems, threat hunting provides the basis for a more proactive security posture – and one that delivers higher ROI on security tools and processes. How can businesses actually add threat hunting to their security arsenals? That’s where solutions like Sumo Logic's Cloud SIEM come in.

At Splunk, we’re constantly on the hunt for new and emerging threats — tirelessly developing detection techniques to zero in on bad actors, while sharing key intelligence around cybercrime activity. But because threat intelligence can relate to so many different things — ranging from spear phishing campaigns to dark web dealings — it can be a challenge to cover and define all the specifics of what (or who) to look out for.

As your security capabilities improve with centralized log management, you can create proactive threat hunting queries. Setting baselines, determining abnormal behavior, and choosing an attack framework helps you mitigate risk and respond to incidents. To reduce key metrics like the mean time to investigate (MTTI) and mean time to respond (MTTR), security operations teams need to understand and create proactive queries based on their environments.

Security analysts have long been challenged to keep up with growing volumes of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, but their struggles have recently grown more acute. Only 46% of security operations leaders are satisfied with their team’s ability to detect threats, and 82% of decision-makers report that their responses to threats are mostly or completely reactive — a shortcoming they’d like to overcome.

With more people working from home, the threat landscape continues to change. Things change daily, and cybersecurity staff needs to change with them to protect information. Threat hunting techniques for an evolving landscape need to tie risk together with log data. Within your environment, there are a few things that you can do to prepare for effective threat hunting. Although none of these is a silver bullet, they can get you better prepared to investigate an alert.