Threat hunting and threat intelligence are two terms that come up frequently when talking about cybersecurity, but their meaning is quite different. Threat intelligence is about knowing what the adversaries are up to, whereas threat hunting is the actual process of looking for signs that these adversaries have gained access to your system.
This distinction is significant as modern cyber defense requires both the knowledge of the threat landscape and the proactive search for the signs of the potential breach. Intelligence is used to direct the hunting process, which in turn is used to validate the intelligence.
What Threat Intelligence Entails
Threat intelligence refers to the act of gathering, analyzing, and making sense of information regarding cyber-attacks. This kind of intelligence can refer to indicators of compromise, adversary tactics, methods and procedures, adversary infrastructure, malware intelligence, phishing operations, and industry threats. The aim of threat intelligence is to enable defenders to learn about their adversaries, how they attack, what they are after, and what markers to look out for.
The ultimate purpose of good intelligence is to provide context. While having a list of IPs that are acting maliciously may be helpful, what will prove more beneficial is a report showing which adversary group is responsible for the attack, what has been seen from them before, what they intend to target next, and what course of action must be taken. The type of intelligence can either be strategic, tactical or operational depending on whether the intended audience is executives, analysts or incident responders respectively.
The most important thing with threat intelligence is the foresight it provides.
What Is Threat Hunting?
Threat hunting is an active and human-driven process of seeking out any malicious activity that automation could have failed to detect. Rather than reacting to alerts, threat hunters seek out any hidden compromise, anomalies, indicators, and noise that would point to the presence of attackers within the system.
Hunting is not an educated guess. It is generally based on hypotheses. A threat hunter may ask questions such as whether the attacker is employing atypical usage of PowerShell to move across systems, stealing credentials through anomalous logon activities, or using a particular attack method observable from the endpoint telemetry. Hunters then look into the logs and other sources of evidence to prove or disprove their hypotheses.
The importance of threat hunting lies in the discovery process itself.
The Fundamental Difference
The most straightforward way to differentiate the two is as follows: threat intelligence gives you the information about what to search for, whereas threat hunting provides assistance in identifying if it is present in your environment.
Threat intelligence looks at the external threats and considers adversaries, campaigns, malware, and trends. Threat hunting is focused on looking into the company’s environment and checking if these external threats have found a place in it already.
In other words, intelligence is usually forward-looking, whereas threat hunting is backward-looking. Intelligence states, “This adversary uses this tactic against this sector.” Threat hunting asks, “Are there any signs of this tactic in our logs right now?”
Both are important, although they have different operations.
How They Work Together
It is highly efficient to have a correlation between threat intelligence and threat hunting. Threat intelligence offers hypotheses and focus areas for hunts. Threat hunting offers feedback and helps improve threat intelligence, helping it understand what threats are real, what indicators are noise, and what behavior is observed in the environment.
For instance, when threat intelligence finds out that an adversary is attacking through public-facing network appliances and uses PowerShell post exploitation, a threat hunting team may search for any strange remote logins, PowerShell execution, and lateral movement. In case of finding anything, this is both detection and response action. Even in case of finding nothing, this is valuable because this will help understand where to pay attention and avoid useless activities.
It is the feedback cycle that enhances the effectiveness of mature security programs. Without threat hunting, intelligence can become theoretical. Without intelligence, threat hunting can become haphazard. Together, they form a more comprehensive approach to security.
Diverse Objectives, Diverse Outputs
The outputs of threat intelligence include reports, advisories, indicators, briefings, and risk assessments. The recipients of threat intelligence could be security operations, leadership, incident response, vulnerability management, and even non-technical audiences that require awareness about their threat exposure.
The output of threat hunting includes findings, suspicious behaviors, incidents, enriched detections, and hypothesis generation. Threat hunting output is actionable and instant. It can result in a detection signature, a containment measure, an investigation, or remediation.
In essence, intelligence enables an organization to determine what requires attention, while hunting ensures that this attention is warranted.
Why People Get Them Mixed Up
The two processes are related in that they both concern themselves with threats, analysis, attacker behavior, and perhaps share common sources of information like logs, malware, endpoint telemetry, and network flows. In some cases, one team can perform both tasks in an organization.
However, the difference lies in the approach taken. Intelligence analysts spend more time observing actors and analyzing trends, while hunters spend more time observing indicators and searching for signs of compromise. The former is typically all about synthesis, while the latter is about detection and investigation.
People tend to get confused because of the commonality of how the two serve defense.
Which Comes First?
There is no hard and fast rule about the sequencing of these. Some organizations prefer starting off with threat intelligence as it is easier to consume compared to making threat hunting operations. There are also others who start with threat hunting as they have adequate telemetry to work with.
One way to go is using threat intelligence to drive the first few hunts. This would help the organization zero in on the right set of threats rather than hunting for random events. Successful hunts could be used to feed into detection engineering and incident response as well.
The most sophisticated programs do not go for either but make use of both.
Why Are Both Important?
Current-day threats are increasingly more sophisticated, fast-moving, and flexible. Automation can help detect many threats, but it will not detect all of them. This is where the role of threat intelligence and threat hunting becomes necessary for organizations.
Intelligence allows defenders to learn about the nature of the threat landscape. Threat hunting allows them to know whether that landscape has made contact with their own. Intelligence is focused outwards; hunting is inwardly focused. Intelligence is all about anticipation; hunting is all about investigation.
Once organizations are able to comprehend the distinction, they are in a position to develop a more well-rounded approach to security. Threat intelligence allows them to be ready. Threat hunting allows them to confirm.
More information can be found about cybersecurity, threat intelligence, digital risk, privacy compliance, and consent management via IntelligenceX and ConsentX. IntelligenceX enables organizations to detect and analyze cyber threats by conducting targeted digital intelligence investigations. ConsentX, on the other hand, equips companies with all the tools needed for global privacy compliance via consent management, cookie compliance, and data privacy.
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