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Stop Waiting for the Alarm. Why Your Network Needs a Hunter, Not Just a Guard
Published: 00:00 11/10/2025
Cyberbezpieczeństwo
Imagine a security guard sitting in a booth. He has plenty of monitors, motion sensors, and a high electric fence. He is calm until the siren wails. This is the traditional approach to cybersecurity. Now, imagine someone who doesn’t wait for the siren. Someone who walks the hallways, checks locked doors, and listens for quiet footsteps, assuming the thief is already there. This is Threat Hunting.
In a world where the average time an intruder spends in a network (known as dwell time) is measured in weeks or even months, a strategy of "sit and wait for the antivirus alert" is like treating the flu only after the patient ends up on a ventilator.
I’ve analyzed the latest guidelines on advanced Threat Hunting and distilled lessons that change the way we think about digital defense.
The "Assumed Breach" Philosophy: Paranoia as a Virtue
The hardest change isn't technological, but psychological. You must adopt the assumption that you have already been hacked. Does that sound pessimistic? Perhaps. But it is a pessimism that saves companies.
Traditional security systems (SIEM, IDS) rely on known threats. They look for virus signatures that someone has seen before. A Threat Hunter works differently. They look for anomalies. They ask questions like: "Why is the accountant connecting to the database server at 3:00 AM?", even if the system didn't flag it as an error.
Threat Hunting is not just another technological layer, but a fundamental shift in security philosophy that assumes infrastructure compromise is inevitable.
Your Own Administrator... Your Enemy?
One of the most fascinating (and terrifying) phenomena in modern attacks is the "Living off the Land" (LotL) technique. Hackers have stopped bringing their own easily detectable burglary tools. Instead, they enter your network and use what they find there.
PowerShell? WMI? Remote Desktop tools? For an administrator, these are daily essentials. For a hacker – the perfect camouflage.
That’s why modern Threat Hunting resembles the work of a detective who isn't looking for the murder weapon, but analyzing the suspect's behavior. For example, we focus on Sysmon Event ID 8 (CreateRemoteThread). This is the technical term for a situation where one process tries to "inject" code into another. Sometimes this is normal system behavior. Often, however, it’s malware trying to hide inside the Notepad or Calculator process.
The Pyramid of Pain: Why Hashes Are Boring
In the Threat Hunter community, there is talk of the "Pyramid of Pain." It’s a concept that classifies attack indicators based on how much their detection "hurts" the attacker.
- At the bottom are file hashes. Changing one bit in a virus changes its checksum. For a hacker, that’s a second of work. Detecting this is trivial and not very effective.
- At the top are TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures). These are the hacker's habits. The way they move, the commands they use.
If you block a specific file, the hacker will simply send another. If you detect and block their modus operandi (e.g., the Pass-the-Hash technique), you force them to learn everything from scratch. That hurts. And that is exactly the point.
Conclusion: Be the Hunter, Not the Prey
AI and automation are entering cybersecurity with great strides, but Threat Hunting remains a distinctly human domain. It requires intuition, creativity, and the ability to connect dots that a machine wouldn't connect.
It also requires the courage to stop trusting the silence in system logs. Because in cybersecurity, silence rarely means peace. It usually means you just don't know what to look for.
And you? When was the last time you checked your logs without a specific reason, just to go "hunting"?
Aleksander
Sources
About the Author
Aleksander Zębrowski
Chief Technology Officer at SecurHub.pl
PhD candidate in neuroscience. Psychologist and IT expert specializing in cybersecurity.
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