How Threat Hunting Can Save Your Business

Technology has been an invaluable asset to most businesses, and it has revolutionized the way that we do business in the modern world. Unfortunately, things occasionally go wrong with technology and when it does, the consequences can be next to disastrous. Technological advances and globalization has had a real impact on customer behavior, and if you’re not looking out for threats, your business could become the next victim of cybercrime. Your business must do whatever it can to remain effective at taking care of threats before they materialize. Anyone who has seen the recent statistics will understand how hackers have grown increasingly sophisticated in their attacks against businesses.

Why Adopt Proactive Measures

You have to exercise proactive measures in taking down and neutralizing real threats to your business. As the doctor says, “An ounce of prevention is worth one pound of the cure.” Taking proactive measures to hunt down and neutralize threats before they ever have the chance to materialize is much better than having to pay out thousands of dollars to address the damage after the fact.

Active Engagement with the Enemy

When your security team engages in active threat hunting, they will take on the enemy aggressively before they have the chance to leap on you. If you wanted to identify how this protects your business, you’d look at how it adopts a more iterative approach. You seek out, identify, and understand your adversaries before they can even enter your network. This does, however, involve much use with external threat intelligence, and you will have to use other important data as a method of uncovering some of your adversaries. If you execute this correctly, threat hunting will lower the dwell time your attacker has on your network. In addition, this lowers the number of new risks that you might face.

To face threats, you will first need to adopt a different mindset from reacting to a security incident to knowing how to respond before an incident takes place. Your biggest objective will be about finding the hidden hacker who has infiltrated your network. To do this, you will also have to think like the hacker. For example, consider the data on your network that the hacker will find the most valuable. Begin with protecting your most valuable assets first. It might sound like common sense, but some business owners don’t even take these measures.

Why Small Businesses Don’t Protect Themselves

You often hear about big security breaches at companies like Yahoo!, Blue Cross, and Sony. Unfortunately, this has created somewhat of a false sense of security because some small businesses have the mistaken belief that they’re completely off the map. In fact, this just isn’t true. Cybercriminals actually tend to target small businesses more because they’re often easy prey. They don’t have the same level of security that a big company has because big businesses understand they’re a target.

Your team’s threat hunting capabilities will grow stronger over time. A good response team is vital to hunting down threats and eliminating them as soon as possible. Your team should also understand how to prioritize and respond to these threats because some might be an even greater danger than others. When you can do this, you keep your business from suffering major financial losses that could spell your end, which is why it’s so important.