A Proactive Approach to Advanced Cyber Threat Hunting

Organizations strive to secure their valuable data and minimise potential damages, recognising that critical operations are susceptible to attacks. This research paper seeks to elucidate the concept of proactive cyber threat hunting. The proposed framework is to help organisations check their preparedness against upcoming threats and their probable mitigation plan. While traditional threat detection methods have been implemented, they often need to address the evolving landscape of advanced cyber threats. Organisations must adopt proactive threat-hunting strategies to safeguard business operations and identify and mitigate unknown or undetected network threats. This research proposes a conceptual model based on a review of the literature. The proposed framework will help the organisation recover from the attack. As the recovery time is less, the financial loss for the company will also be reduced. Also, the attacker might need more time to gather data, so there will be less stealing of confidential information. Cybersecurity companies use proactive cyber defence strategies to reduce an attacker's time on the network. The different frameworks used are SANS, MITRE, Hunting ELK, Logstash, Digital Kill Chain, Model in Diamonds, and NIST Framework for Cybersecurity, which proposes a proactive approach. It is beneficial for the defensive security team to assess their capabilities to defend against Advanced Threats Persistent (ATP) and a wide range of attack vectors.