20 Jan Cyber Hunting Plays Crucial Role in Defense-In-Depth Approach to Cybersecurity
Today’s evolving cyber threats faced by Federal departments and agencies (D&A) cover a wide range of malicious activities from nation-state sponsors, criminal organizations, terrorist groups, hacktivists, insider threats, and others. Securing networks, systems, and applications demands a multi-layered approach that provides defense-in-depth to protect valuable data and information. But in the crush of the day-to-day, how can one be sure that one’s network is truly resilient? How can organizations better anticipate and adapt to new threats, reduce risk, and increase their confidence in the security of their critical data and information? This is where cyber hunting comes into play and provides a valuable asset.
By conducting cyber hunts as part of routine cybersecurity operations, organizations can improve their cyber resiliency while increasing their confidence in their Cybersecurity Operations Center (CSOC). A cyber hunt evaluation and assessment:
- Provides a means to identify, mitigate, and remediate threats by conducting network, system, and application evaluation as well as assessment of your organization.
- Increases the chance for identification of new security incidents which may remain undiscovered by standard routines.
As a result, the customer will gain a clear understanding of their logical infrastructure components, enabling them to make the right decisions for improving cyber maturity.
Cyber Hunt Benefits
Adding cyber network hunting and advanced analytics to the cyber operations mix enables Federal government departments and agencies to move beyond their current capabilities, keeping ahead of adversaries while they continually mature their systems.
Criterion’s Cyber Hunt Framework was developed in our Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (CoE), a dedicated group of cybersecurity professionals and subject matter experts (SMEs) with a focus on understanding and extending Federal standards while implementing industry best practices. This development and application of practical, innovative, and continuously improving cybersecurity approaches, methodologies, and technologies directly benefits our customers today and into the future, as they tap into Criterion’s specialized expertise. Criterion’s Cyber Hunt Framework provides key benefits including:
- Structured and repeatable: We provide an efficient threat hunting methodology with a high potential for success, making threat hunting a repeatable process that continues to evolve over time.
- Threat-focused: Every hunt has an explicit purpose of identifying threat behavior. The end goal is the discovery and remediation of malicious threat activity in the customer’s environment, which helps to lower their enterprise risk.
- Enterprise-wide: We consider the entire ecosystem of the customer’s enterprise, leading to a reduction in breaches and break attempts and a smaller attack surface with fewer attack vectors. This increases response speed and accuracy and leads to measurable improvements in security.
- Beyond current capabilities: Leveraging our Cyber Hunt Framework results in the use of people, process, and technology beyond the capacities of a traditional SOC, helping our customers move from reactive to more proactive cybersecurity operations.
Criterion has long been a trusted partner to Federal Departments and Agencies (D&As) in cybersecurity because we understand the most sophisticated cyber threats and how to mitigate them. Criterion’s Cyber Hunt solution is already being used by our Federal customers either as a stand-alone solution or combined with Criterion’s Cybersecurity Operations Center (CSOC) services.