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.
Understanding Adversarial Behaviors is Key
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.
