The 2024 CrowdStrike Threat Hunting Report emphasizes the evolution of adversaries as they navigate through identity, endpoint, and cloud domains. As adversaries adopt increasingly stealthy techniques and shift across these domains, threat hunting teams must adapt and refine their strategies to effectively track and neutralize these advanced threats.
What is Threat Hunting?
Threat hunting is a proactive cybersecurity strategy that involves detecting the presence of malicious activities before they cause harm. It begins with a hypothesis and progresses through iterative steps to validate this assumption. Teams of domain experts, such as those from CrowdStrike OverWatch and Mandiant, are typically at the forefront of these efforts.
The Role of Cyber Deception in Threat Hunting
While traditional tools like Indicator of Compromise (IoC) sweeps and log searches are foundational, modern adversaries have evolved to diminish their effectiveness. As adversaries use more interactive intrusions and custom malware, the effectiveness of conventional IoC sweeps has decreased.
Cyber deception offers a powerful augmentation to traditional hunting tools. By setting up deceptive traps in the environment, threat-hunting teams can create controlled scenarios to engage and expose latent threats, thereby validating their hunting hypotheses and exposing threat lateral movement.
Hunting Cross-Domain Adversaries with Cyber Deception
Adversaries today are pivoting across identity, endpoint, and cloud domains to bypass detection, making single-domain hunting insufficient. They often utilize insider threats to acquire trusted access, complicating detection further.
- Identity Hunting: Adversaries exploit gaps in traditional security solutions to gain access to credentials for lateral movement. The activity performed by the adversary blends in with legitimate activity, making it challenging to detect based on logs or network traffic alone. Often using Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools for subsequent lateral movements, adversaries skillfully cover their tracks. Deploying identity honeytokens—which mimic human users and service accounts—provides teams a proactive tool to detect the presence of these adversaries early.
- Cloud Hunting: With a 75% increase in cloud intrusions in 2024, adversaries are specifically targeting cloud environments. They exploit users and roles to access cloud resources illicitly. Since cloud-native workloads often cannot support agents, and the vast amount of cloud logs complicates detection, honeytokens that mimic IAM users, roles, and secrets can enhance visibility and detection capabilities without relying on extensive log analysis.
- Endpoint Hunting: Adversaries using “living off the land” tactics employ built-in operating system tools and utilities, enabling them to remain undetected on endpoints. They often target credential caches on endpoints to gain access to valid credentials for lateral movement. This strategic use of system tools allows the adversary to blend seamlessly with existing system functioning, complicating the detection process. By deploying honeytokens in these credential caches, which represent privileged accounts, hunting teams can swiftly and effectively identify stealthy threats.
The strategic use of honeytokens across identity, endpoint, and cloud domains provides hunting teams with valuable tools to create opportunities for engaging adversaries as they pivot across these areas.
Acalvio’s Threat Hunting Capabilities
Acalvio ShadowPlex offers a dedicated threat-hunting workbench for deploying targeted deceptions to uncover latent threats and verify hypotheses. It provides a suite of honeytokens for identity, endpoint, and cloud domains, including deceptive user accounts, service accounts, and credentials. These honeytokens are designed to be realistic and tempting to adversaries, facilitating their engagement without the complexities associated with traditional agent-based systems.
The integration of ShadowPlex’s agentless architecture and prebuilt honeytokens simplifies the deployment of effective cross-domain threat-hunting strategies, making it a potent tool against sophisticated cyber threats.
Ready to Enhance Your Threat Hunting Strategy?
Discover how Acalvio ShadowPlex can transform your threat detection capabilities. Visit our website to learn more about our innovative cyber deception tools and schedule a demo today. Equip your team with the advanced tools needed to outsmart even the most sophisticated adversaries.
Explore Acalvio Threat Hunting Solution [here] | Read the CrowdStrike report [here]
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