Recently, I’ve been thinking more and more about our Threat Detection processes and what we’ve been doing to increase our detection capabilities. Because of that, I thought I would try and articulate at a high level a relatively normal Threat Detection Strategy that focuses on Detection & Prevention. I’ll be doing a series of posts over the coming weeks all in the same vein of Detection Engineering and IR so stay tuned! (they’ll be a lot more technical than this one) I’m also trying a different format with this post, making it more business professional and less full of memes to gauge interaction, feel free to provide feedback as I get back into the swing of things.

Understand the Shift from Detection to Prevention

Traditionally, detection involves monitoring for known attack patterns and alerting security teams to investigate. However, this approach often fails to capture novel or evolving threats, as it’s limited by predefined rules or signatures. Proactive detection emphasizes anticipating threats and mitigating risks before they cause harm. We all know it’s not if we get attacked, but when we get attacked. Early risk mitigation will alleviate the pressure should you find yourself under attack. This shift requires a combination of techniques:

• Behavioral Monitoring: Identify unusual patterns or deviations from the norm.
• Threat Intelligence: Stay informed on emerging attack vectors.
• Risk Assessment: Gauge the severity of potential threats and prioritize responses.

Establish a Strong Threat Intelligence Foundation

Threat intelligence provides real-time data on threat actors, emerging threats, and indicators of compromise (IOCs), which are essential for anticipating potential attacks. However, threat intelligence needs to be actionable and tailored to your organization’s specific risk profile.

Key steps include:

• Collecting and Enriching Data: Integrate data from threat intelligence feeds, industry reports, and internal logs. Look for tools that aggregate feeds into a single pane to streamline analysis.
• Threat Intelligence Prioritization: Not all intelligence is equally valuable. Filter out irrelevant information and focus on intelligence most applicable to your industry, location, and technology stack.
• Building Context: Contextualize intelligence by correlating with internal telemetry data, such as endpoint logs or network traffic, to uncover high-risk anomalies.

Implementation Tip: Use a threat intelligence platform (TIP) to manage and correlate threat data, automating processes like IOC ingestion and enrichment.

Leverage Behavioral Detection Techniques

Traditional signature-based detection is effective for known threats, but proactive security relies on identifying unknown or evolving attacks. This requires behavioral analysis:

• User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA): Analyze and understand normal user behaviors and patterns to detect anomalies. Suspicious behavior, such as accessing unusual servers at odd hours, can indicate compromise.
• Threat Hunting to Establish Baselines: Conduct regular threat hunting exercises to establish baselines of typical activity. This practice can reveal “low and slow” attacks that operate under detection thresholds.
• Behavioral Signatures and Machine Learning: Behavioral detection tools use machine learning to identify deviations from normal patterns, alerting teams to abnormal activities even if they don’t match known threat signatures. This is a tricky one and likely comes with industry skepticism as ML can often lead to lots of false positives until properly tuned.

Example: If a user typically logs in from a specific location and suddenly logs in from an unusual location, this is often called an Impossible Travel alert, and outside of someone using a VPN or is on a short plane ride, it typically warrants an investigation.

Automate and Orchestrate Repetitive Tasks

Automation is crucial for proactive detection. By automating repetitive tasks, you free up security analysts to focus on higher-value activities like advanced threat hunting and strategic risk management. I can speak first hand on how automation has helped SOC’s I’ve worked with in the past handle more capacity than ever and reduce MTTR (Mean Time To Response).

Automation opportunities include:

• Alert Enrichment: Automate data enrichment to add context to alerts. For example, adding relevant user information or recent activity logs allows analysts to assess severity faster.
• Rapid Triage and Containment: Use automated workflows to quickly quarantine potentially compromised devices or accounts based on preset rules.
• Incident Response Playbooks: Create automated playbooks for consistent, reliable responses to common attack scenarios. For example, automatically isolating an endpoint if it shows signs of ransomware activity.

Implementation Tip: Invest in SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) platforms to build and customize automation workflows tailored to your security environment.

Important Notes: SOAR can be costly, both in terms of capital spent and human hours involved. There are some open-sourced/community SOARs, that you can start with. But, you’ll still be spending time developing the platform. Make sure you adequately plan out your goals before going down this path.

Develop Proactive Defense Mechanisms

While threat detection identifies potential risks, defensive mechanisms are essential for actively preventing these threats. Consider implementing some of these options:

• Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA): Adopt a zero-trust model where every access request is verified, regardless of origin. This reduces the chances of lateral movement by attackers within the network.
• Micro-Segmentation: Divide your network into smaller segments to contain threats if they do manage to infiltrate the perimeter.
  • Note: As great as this sounds, companies with large networks, it can be nearly impossible, but everyone loves to mention it. If you can’t, focus on RBAC and least privilege.
• Continuous Risk Assessment: Implement tools to continuously assess and score risks. Adjust defenses dynamically based on changes in risk level, reinforcing high-risk areas.
  • Note: This does often require a decent bit of work up front, you’ll need to tune/build this so it’s catered to your environment.
• Conditional Access Policies: Enforce MFA company wide user Conditional Access Policies, or enforce what devices can be used to access O365 and blocking unknown devices from being able to authenticate.

Integrate Regular Threat Hunting into Your Strategy

Threat hunting is a proactive measure that involves actively seeking out potential threats instead of waiting for alerts. Routine threat hunting can help detect sophisticated attacks that traditional methods miss.

Steps include:

• Data-Driven Hunting: Utilize endpoint, network, and application logs to look for signs of compromise, such as unusual data exfiltration attempts.
  • Note: If your org doesn’t already have this role, I’d look to dedicate a head count for someone who full times threat hunts and develops detections. Call the role whatever you’d like, but I truly believe every SecOps in this day in age needs to have someone doing this.
• Red and Blue Team Exercises: Conduct regular red team/blue team exercises to simulate potential attacks, helping your team anticipate and address potential weaknesses.

Implement Continuous Improvement Practices

Security is a dynamic field where the only constant is change. A proactive detection strategy must be continuously evaluated and refined to remain effective.

• Regular Rule Tuning and Optimization: Regularly review and update detection rules to keep up with evolving threats. Periodically audit your rule set to remove outdated or redundant rules.
• Establish Feedback Loops: After incidents, conduct root cause analyses to determine what worked and where improvements are needed. Apply these learnings to enhance future threat detection and response strategies.
• Team Training and Development: Equip your team with skills in advanced threat detection techniques, especially in newer areas like machine learning, threat hunting, and behavior analytics.
• Table Top and Cloud Ranges Exercise: Table top exercises can be a ton of fun and provide great lessons, a lot of compliance certifications are even requiring Table Top exercises. Cloud Ranges provides hands on experience, however, building a range to your exact environment can be time consuming and costly.

Invest in Tools and Technologies that Support Proactive Security

The right technology stack can amplify the effectiveness of a proactive detection strategy. Look for tools that provide:

• Real-Time Monitoring and Analytics: Ensure you have visibility into all network layers and endpoints, with real-time data analytics to capture emerging threats.
  • Note: This is your SIEM. Some great open-source platforms like Elastic exist for this very reason. In fact, most of your detection is going to happen right inside the SIEM. It should be your cornerstone for your detection strategy. (In a future post, we’ll talk about building out the SecOps logging)
• Cloud-Specific Security Tools: As more organizations shift to the cloud, prioritize tools that specialize in cloud security to detect cloud-native threats.
  • Note: This is becoming more and more popular, although few open-sourced tools exist for this, there are some great vendors on the market. Wiz, Orca, and Sysdig are three vendors worth looking at.
• Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs) and SOAR Solutions: TIPs consolidate threat data from multiple sources, while SOAR solutions automate repetitive processes and speed up response times.
  • Note: As your SecOps practice matures, expect these platforms on the horizon. The Threat Intelligence community has an abundance of open-sourced technology to help out. MISP and AlienVault OTX are worth looking at.

There’s so much more to add on this subject, but this is a pretty grounded approach to developing your Threat Detection Strategy. We’re really on scratching the surface with this, security is constantly changing, which means your strategy needs to be open to constantly evolve.

I hope this format wasn’t overly boring, I wanted to keep this one a bit more professional since it’s mostly high level strategies. I’ve got 3 new posts in the can that are much more technical, focusing on building your SecOps Program, Mapping Mitre to your Detection Engineering, and scaling your IR program.

Feel free to chase me down and Twitter (x) or LinkedIn if you have any questions/comments!

Thanks for reading!