IDENTIFY & STOP THREATS THAT EVADE DETECTION
Determined threat actors frequently outmaneuver the best detection-based defenses, but they still reveal expected adversary behaviors once inside an environment. Behavioral threat hunting can drastically reduce attacker dwell time and limit the cost of a data breach, reputational damage, and compliance risks.
Behavioral threat hunting uses security event data to identify patterns of behavior based on adversary intelligence that reveal a specific actor’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) inside an environment. By studying how specific threat actors have used tools, systems, and software to achieve their goals, threat hunters can identify expected behaviors within the “cyber kill chain” that indicate network pivoting, expansion or exfiltration.
Rather than waiting for a security alert, threat hunting is a continual and proactive search for threats that have evaded detection and any blindspots that prevent security teams from seeing adversary behaviors across network, host and cloud environments.
Behaviors are the most powerful method of identification. While harder to elicit from adversaries than point-in-time indicators of compromise (IOCs) used to detect known threats, behaviors last much longer and are often adopted as standard operating procedures (SOPs) that adversaries are reluctant to change. Identifying a single behavior from an attacker’s kill chain warrants a broader search for more behaviors associated with the actor.
To bypass rule-based detections, nation-state threat actors and cybercriminals increasingly use Living Off the Land (LOtL) behaviors and system binaries (LOLbins). LOTL cloaks malicious activity behind trusted IT administrator tools that may be monitored but often don’t trigger alerts, resulting in missed detections. LOTL behaviors are now the top technique used in APTs, ransomware, and industrial espionage, according to the SANS Institute's 2025 Threat Hunting survey. In 2024, ransomware actors tracked by Intel 471 breached over 630 organizations with annual revenues between $100 million to $1 billion that likely had an industry-leading detection-based security solution.
Change the Game: Case Study
"Our CTI team defines the threat landscape of the organization and reports threats that are targeting us and our industry, as well as active threat actors, their malware and campaigns. Then, the threat hunting team focuses their hunts in a more informed manner based on threat intelligence findings.
CTI-driven threat hunting enhances the relevance and accuracy and when combined with adversarial emulations, helps Security Operations be more proactive and productive."
Quote from Fortune 500 US-based retail corporation
How Intel 471 Can Help
To combat advanced threats, more organizations are adopting structured threat hunting, a formalized search for high-risk TTPs and behaviors repeated across an environment. The key tools for structured hunts are hypothesis-based advanced behavioral queries that search for TTPs and behaviors in security logs and telemetry stored on security and data platforms.
Building hunt queries takes time, effort, and skills that are hard to find. Organizations can overcome these barriers with HUNTER, a hunt content platform with an expanding library of pre-validated “hunt packages” that contain queries for most observed TTPs, contextual adversary intelligence, and mitigations. This helps hunters skip past lengthy research and testing for hundreds of advanced behaviors to immediately begin searching for undetected threats and allow analysts to focus on testing new hypotheses and creating new hunt queries and custom detections for threats unique to their organization.
BUILD YOUR THREAT HUNTING MATURITY
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Organizations building in-house threat hunting capabilities to combat advanced threats need the right tools and intelligence-driven behavioral hunt content to ensure consistent, reliable hunt processes that identify threats and visibility gaps. Intel 471’s HUNTER platform delivers an expanding library of pre-validated behavioral hunt queries designed for the SIEM, EDR, NDR, and XDR platforms your teams use supported by up-to-the-minute contextual CTI, emulation and validation bundles, mitigations, and runbooks to improve analyst productivity.
The HUNTER platform also provides The Hunt Management Module, a centralized management tool, to coordinate hunts consistently across teams and measure hunt effectiveness with metrics that demonstrate business value and improvements in security posture.
Signing up to the HUNTER Community Edition provides access to dozens of these hunt packages, offering:
Sign up for your HUNTER Community Edition account now to see how it can support your threat hunting operations.
