Great, you’ve decided to move beyond reactive incident response and start hunting. While hunting is primarily a way of thinking about incident response it does rely on your technical capabilities, so what tools should you use? The focus for me is always on open source tools with tools with wide ranging applications. Here are my favorites: Endpoint Alerting Tools: Facebook osquery osquery is a tool from Facebook that describes itself as:...

Talk to anyone in the DFIR Illuminati and one of the topics that always comes up is Hunting. Much like threat intelligence & string theory, people talk a lot about this, but nearly no one knows what it actually means. Proactive vs. Reactive At its core, Hunting is about taking a proactive vs a reactive approach to identifying incidents. In Reactive organizations, an incident starts when notification comes in; whether that’s a vendor IDS or AV alert, or worse a phone call from the FBI or getting Krebs-ed....

One of the most talked-about intelligence concepts in information security today is F3EAD. Standing for Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, and Disseminate, this is a methodology for combining operations (in this case we’re talking about kinetic ops) and the intelligence process. While the Intelligence Cycle & SANS IR cycle are both useful, they are ultimately academic. If the goal is Intelligence-Driven Incident Response, we need to combine intelligence with ops, and that’s where F3EAD shines....

While I certainly didn’t plan to release this post the same day Paterva released their latest update, Maltego Chlorine, it’s a happy coincidence. It’s a great day to go download fresh Maltego hotness and start writing some transforms! Maltego is one of the most unusual tools in the information security space. While there are dozens of vulnerability scanners and piles of reversing tools, there’s nothing else like Maltego short of spending $$$ on Palantir....

A small number of topics get intelligence driven incident responders incredibly frustrated: Using intelligence to mean smart (I’ll share more about that later this week) Bad attribution based on incomplete information and bad assumptions Misuse of the term APT (in most cases by marketing departments) Advanced Persistent Threat remains the buzzword of choice for vendors, but it’s used incorrectly, and lots of people know that and don’t say anything. As a result I want to go on the record and correct a couple key misnomers....