The challenges of Threat Hunting for the SOC
What challenges does the SOC face in threat hunting?
In today’s digital landscape, the attack techniques used by cybercriminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated and effective.
Cyber threats are frequent and unpredictable, and it is often difficult to detect dangers within the IT infrastructure, as evidenced by the challenges faced by Security Operation Center (SOC) teams in their Threat Hunting activities.
Below is a detailed list of the most common challenges, including operational, technical, and organizational aspects.
Complexity of advanced threats
Attackers use increasingly sophisticated tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to evade automated detection systems, such as fileless malware, encrypted traffic, or lateral movement techniques. These advanced methods require a proactive approach to be identified.
Emerging threats often do not match known patterns or predefined rules, making them difficult to detect with traditional tools.
Human resource limitations
The lack of qualified personnel is a significant challenge. Many SOCs lack experienced threat hunting analysts, which limits the ability to conduct in-depth investigations.
Workload management is critical: SOC teams are often overwhelmed by thousands of daily alerts, leaving little time for proactive activities like threat hunting.
Lack of time and prioritization
Most SOCs devote the majority of their time to incident response and alert management, neglecting threat hunting activities. According to some statistics, only a small percentage of critical alerts are actually investigated.
Tool and data complexity
Analyzing data from various sources (endpoints, network traffic, cloud systems, etc.) requires advanced tools and specific skills. However, integrating and correlating data across these tools can be complex and time-consuming.
Manual processes needed to collect and validate evidence slow down the overall efficiency of threat hunting activities.
Limited budget
A lack of adequate funding to implement dedicated threat hunting platforms or train personnel poses a significant obstacle for many SOCs.
Need for collaboration and feedback
A common challenge is the lack of integration between threat hunting activities and daily SOC operations. If investigation results are not shared with other teams (e.g., detection rule engineers or incident response teams), the opportunity to enhance overall defensive capabilities is lost.
Constantly evolving threat landscape
The threat landscape is constantly changing. This requires SOC teams to continuously update themselves on new attacker techniques and emerging vulnerabilities.
Automation difficulties
While automation can support threat hunting, many activities still require significant human intervention, especially when analyzing anomalous or suspicious behavior that does not follow predefined patterns.
How Threat Hunting Integrates into Daily Operations
Automation and advanced tools
Technologies like SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) allow SOCs to automate threat detection and event correlation. These tools aggregate data from multiple sources and use artificial intelligence to identify anomalies that may indicate malicious activity.
Automated threat hunting rules based on indicators of compromise (IoCs) and behavioral models reduce analysts’ manual workload, enabling them to focus on more complex investigations.
Integration of Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence provides up-to-date data on emerging threats, helping the SOC refine security policies and identify compromise signals. This integration allows analysts to anticipate attacks rather than merely react to incidents.
Sharing information across teams and departments enhances collaboration and improves the SOC’s ability to handle complex threats.
Continuous monitoring and proactivity
The SOC must constantly monitor the IT infrastructure to identify suspicious activity in real time. This includes log analysis, endpoint telemetry, and network traffic to detect lateral movements or hidden malware.
Proactive threat hunting is based on hypotheses guided by vulnerabilities or abnormal behavior, verified through queries on data collected from the system.
The Effectiveness of SG-SOC in Threat Hunting
CyberTrust 365’s SG-SOC as a Service makes Threat Hunting operations more effective by integrating various components that work synergistically to proactively identify hidden vulnerabilities and develop remediation activities promptly.
Here are some distinctive elements that allow the SOC team to focus on the most critical threats:
- Proprietary SGBox SIEM & SOAR platform that delivers detailed security information and activates automatic countermeasures.
- Proactive Threat Intelligence, including external attack surface monitoring and Dark Web analysis.
- Advanced Log Management capabilities of SGBox and Vulnerability Assessment to detect and prioritize vulnerabilities within the company’s IT infrastructure.