In today's digital age, cyber threats have become a major concern for organizations of all sizes and industries. Recent high-profile data breaches have made it clear that no organization is immune to the dangers of cyber attacks. The fact is, when organizations are hit by an intrusion, many of their security measures fall short of protecting their data. This is particularly true in Australia, where there has been a staggering 33% increase in large scale data breaches in the past year, according to the OAIC's Notifiable Data Breaches Report.

Cyber criminals and state-sponsored threat actors are well aware of the valuable information that can be obtained through stolen data. This data can be used for extortion, sold to third parties, or used for economic espionage and intelligence collection. In light of this, adversaries are using their full human ingenuity to find new ways to evade automated security controls.

This is where human threat hunting comes in. The core mission of threat hunters is to proactively seek out these attempts to evade detection, using their own human ingenuity to stay one step ahead of the adversary. By deploying human threat hunters, organizations can gain a significant advantage over cyber criminals and other malicious actors.

It's crucial for security leaders to understand the current state of play when it comes to data security. Adversaries are acutely aware of the gaps in fully-autonomous and legacy signature-based security systems and are using novel hands-on and living-off-the-land techniques in conjunction with compromised credentials to subvert technology-based controls, infiltrate organizational networks, and access sensitive data.

The only way to keep pace with the operational tempo and evolving capabilities and techniques employed by today's adversaries is to augment technology-based defenses with elite human expertise and around-the-clock monitoring. Human-led threat hunting provides organizations with the critical visibility and timely, actionable intelligence needed to stop unknown and unseen adversaries in their tracks.

Intrusions motivated by data collection objectives will often be stealthy and may be drawn out over an extended period to increase the opportunity of accessing valuable data. Adversaries may go to great lengths to understand their environment and blend in with expected administrative activity. Without proactive human-driven hunting capabilities, adversaries can remain embedded in a company's infrastructure for months, quietly learning about the environment, syphoning off data, and collecting additional login credentials to provide further means of access and potentially expand their reach into new segments of the victim environment.

Threat hunting is the practice of continuously and proactively searching for signs that an adversary may have slipped past automated security controls. Threat hunters search for the patterns of behavior associated with malicious post-exploitation activity using finely-tuned statistical methods, hypothesis-driven investigations, and analysis derived from the latest threat intelligence.

Human threat hunting is essential for cyber protection. It provides organizations with the visibility and intelligence needed to stop unknown and unseen adversaries and regain confidence in their systems and data security. Don't let your organization become the next high-profile data breach. Invest in human threat hunting today and secure your organization's future.

Don't miss this opportunity to enhance your threat hunting capabilities and protect your organization from cyber attacks. Request a personalized introduction of the HUNTER Platform today and see how it can revolutionize your threat hunting efforts.