Why Threat hunting is Critical?

Security personnel can’t afford to believe that their security system is impenetrable. They must remain ever vigilant for the next threat or vulnerability. Rather than sit back and wait for threats to strike, cyber threat hunting develops hypotheses based on knowing the behaviors of threat actors and validating those hypotheses through active searches in the environment. With threat hunting, an expert doesn’t start from an alert or even Indicators of Compromise (IOC) but deeper reasoning and forensics. In many cases the hunter’s efforts create and substantiate the alert or IOC. Cyber threat hunting aggressively assumes that a breach in the enterprise has or will occur. Security personnel hunt down threats in their environment rather than deploy the latest tool.
Threat hunting is important because sophisticated threats can get past automated cybersecurity. Although automated security tools and tier 1 and 2 security operations center (SOC) analysts should be able to deal with roughly 80% of threats, you still need to worry about the remaining 20%. The remaining 20% of threats are more likely to include sophisticated threats that can cause significant damage. Given enough time and resources, they will break into any network and avoid detection for up to 280 days on average. Effective threat hunting helps reduce the time from intrusion to discovery, reducing the amount of damage done by attackers.
Attackers often lurk for weeks, or even months, before discovery. They wait patiently to siphon off data and uncover enough confidential information or credentials to unlock further access, setting the stage for a significant data breach. How much damage can potential threats cause? According to the “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020,” a data breach costs a company almost USD 4 million on average. And the harmful effects of a breach can linger for years. The longer the time between system failure and response deployed, the more it can cost an organization.