Threat Hunting

Uncover hidden threats in your digital environment

Advanced threat actors can blend in with their target environment, evading traditional alert-based security controls. Booz Allen’s proactive threat hunting methodology identifies and eliminates the most sophisticated attackers to reduce the operational, reputational, and financial risks they inflict.

Traditional cyber threat detection capabilities, such as intrusion detection and prevention systems and antivirus software, are largely reactive and rely on a cyber threat to trip an alarm somewhere within the environment. Booz Allen’s proactive approach to threat hunting deploys experienced “hunters” who methodically analyze available data to identify anomalous behavior and pick up the trail of previously undetected cyber threats.

Threat hunting identifies and remediates advanced persistent threats (APT) that engage in long-term campaigns to compromise a target’s environment. Booz Allen’s threat hunters have the cyber expertise required to defeat APTs that evade reactive, rule-based cybersecurity defenses.

Traditional security products like antivirus software and network intrusion detection systems rely on known signature-based detections to create alerts. These tools alone cannot completely protect your environment: They’re unable to adapt to new malware that’s continuously being created. New malware could go undetected, leaving your network vulnerable.

Threat hunting uses a different approach. What attackers cannot readily change are their tools, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTTP), which are essentially their observed behavior patterns. By understanding how an attacker operates on a target network and what behavior they may exhibit, threat hunters can analyze endpoint data to find advanced adversaries hiding in the network, silently carrying out their objectives.

By combining threat hunting with traditional security products, an organization can achieve a defense-in-depth approach to network security, covering down on both known and unknown threats.

The value that threat hunting provides goes above and beyond the detection of advanced adversaries. In addition to the detection of malicious activity, it provides visibility into your network, confidence in your security posture, and can also uncover:

Unfavorable admin practices
Use of unapproved software
Misconfigured policies, systems, or applications
Sneaky user behavior
Legacy assets

What Sets Us Apart

Immediate Value – Our Hunt Analytics Library contains 450+ hypothesis-based analytics aligned to the MITRE ATT&CK Framework. We deploy these assets on Day One to instantaneously mature existing defenses and identify indicators of adversary activity across the digital environment.

Faster Detection – We bring our proven Hunt Methodology to mitigate the impact of advanced threats. It includes the automation of difficult processes and a repository of indicators of compromise collected from past engagements, open source collection, and proprietary data sources mapped against threat actor groups, campaigns, or prior attacks/events to support detection and shape defenses.

Proven Approach – We have provided threat hunting support services to the most advanced organizations across the Fortune 500 and government sectors. Our processes, methods, and technologies have been tested, refined, and proven through our engagement on some of the most significant attacks in U.S. history.

Decades of Cybersecurity Experience – Booz Allen’s depth of experience in building and operating commercial threat hunting programs allows us to build and sustain industry-leading cyber threat hunting programs for our clients. Our understanding of the pain points leads to proven, documented solutions to rapidly address the hardest problems within hunt uplift and maturation.

Our Threat Hunting Services

Hunt Capability Development

Booz Allen utilizes our industry expertise to develop a state-of-the-art hunt capability for your organization. We solve the big data challenges of accumulating, standardizing, enriching, and searching the data coming from your endpoint detection and response and other huntable data sources. In addition, we offer integration with our Hunt Analytics Library, which currently contains 450+ hunt analytics focused on adversary TTTPs.

Hunt Capability Enhancement

Booz Allen’s experienced threat hunters can join your existing threat hunting team to help develop talent, tradecraft methodology, and technology. We also provide training on threat hunting methodology and tradecraft through knowledge sharing and real-world, hands-on scenarios.