By Satnam Narang, Sr. Staff Research Engineer, Tenable
We all know that cyber risk is a problem but do we truly grasp the scale? Nearly two-thirds of businesses across the globe have fallen victim to ransomware and only 30% of organizations say they are cyber resilient. Here’s a staggering fact: by 2027, cybercrime is forecast to cost a jaw-dropping $23.84 trillion globally. All of this is despite increasing cybersecurity investments.
So, why aren’t things improving? Adversaries know how to exploit or circumvent defenses, and often work in the shadows of an organization’s network for months before a compromise or breach is even detected. According to IBM, shadow data plays a huge role in this—data is multiplying so fast that tracking and safeguarding it all has become a Herculean task.
Even with top-tier tools and skilled teams, detecting threats can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. The flood of alerts and data is overwhelming, often leaving cybersecurity teams reacting instead of defending. But reacting isn’t enough. To stay ahead of the game, organizations need to shift from a reactive to a proactive defense strategy—threat hunting—a preventive approach that empowers teams to identify and neutralize risks before cybercriminals strike.
Why Proactive Threat Hunting is Challenging?
Imagine looking for needles in a haystack. Now imagine some of those needles are hidden even deeper, inside of haystacks within haystacks. That’s what threat hunters face every day. Modern threats are highly sophisticated, and security tools designed to detect suspicious behavior often miss the full picture. They demand advanced skills—like malware analysis, packet analysis, and threat intelligence—that many teams don’t fully possess.
On top of that, most tools focus on isolated data points, creating silos instead of a cohesive view of the network. Without comprehensive and continuous monitoring across every platform and device, organizations are left vulnerable. Worse yet, without proper context— connecting the dots—teams are buried under a mountain of data and miss crucial indicators of compromise.
Cybercriminals thrive on persistence and stealth. Periodic scans and checks aren’t enough to catch them because their attacks aren’t periodic—they’re continuous, evolving, and patient. To combat this, organizations need continuous monitoring and vigilant hunting for suspicious activity and telltale signs of compromise.
How to Proactively Hunt Threats?
Enterprise environments are large, and complex and can span multiple segments of a network and sites across the world. Domain-specific security tools or point solutions make it very difficult to build a comprehensive asset inventory, compile vulnerability statuses, detect changes, and assess threats. While the data and insights gathered from point tools are valuable for understanding asset-specific risk, it isn’t enough to proactively hunt for threats as they create data silos.
An organization’s network has several cybersecurity layers, and it’s essential to proactively hunt across the entire attack surface. Focusing only on initial access points, teams miss escalating threats or allow a stealth actor to bypass detection. Proactively hunting for signs of an attacker’s lateral movement through the network, identifying unauthorized privilege escalation, access rights abuse, and other threats, helps reveal potential risks that wouldn’t have been identified initially.
Effective threat hunting boils down to three things: visibility, context, and action. To achieve this, organizations need the right tools in place to actively monitor the entire attack surface — including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations on-prem and in the cloud, users, assets, and attack paths. When combined, business intelligence and threat intelligence, provide context to security teams to help identify suspicious or malicious activity.
Focusing resources on the most critical vulnerabilities with the greatest potential to impact your operations ensures targeted, effective resolution and maximizes the effectiveness of a security program.
If threats aren’t proactively identified, organizations have no way of knowing if a malicious actor is lurking within their systems. Cybercriminals that breach an organization’s systems can remain within the network for long periods, collecting data, and looking for sensitive information and credentials that will allow them to access systems deeper into an organization.
The threat posed by attackers can lead to irrevocable financial and reputational ramifications. Proactive threat hunting allows organizations to identify and eradicate malicious actors, who get past initial defenses, preventing further compromise before it can occur.
