Why you should include threat hunting services in your portfolio

According to Pulse, 32% of IT leaders say their organisations plan to reinforce their endpoint security posture by adding a threat hunting programme to their overall security strategy. This is not surprising since it is a potent tool to defend your customer.

According to a Cybersecurity Insider’s Threat Hunting Report, based on a survey of cyber security professionals conducted in February 2021, organisations highlight a broad range of goals they expect to fulfil with their threat hunting programme or any related service.

Reducing exposure to external threats was named by more than half of the organisations surveyed (51%), followed by reducing the number of breaches and infections (45%) and reducing attack surface (43%). In summary, businesses that plan to reinforce their endpoint security posture will adopt a threat hunting programme into their overall security strategy. 

Key benefits of threat hunting

• Threat hunting allows for the timely discovery and disruption of internal and external threats that have bypassed technology-based controls before a breach. It augments existing technology-based controls with human-layer expertise.
• Further, threat hunting augments security technologies with human expertise to reduce the dwell time. Threat hunting leverages human experience to locate and stop advanced attacks that might otherwise linger unseen for days, weeks or even months. It shortens the dwell time and it's the key to reliably stopping breaches.
• It arms security teams with insights required to disrupt adversaries at scale. While threat hunting operations occur at the beginning of the process, finding those unknown threats is still only half the battle. When it is performed effectively, a highly structured threat hunting programme arms the security teams with the insights they need to disrupt threats.
• It feeds the continuous effort to reduce the attack surface and improve automated detection capabilities. New patterns must be leveraged to improve detection capabilities, leaving threats with nowhere to hide.

Taking your security services to the next level

Those MSPs that are considering taking advantage of the opportunity and adopting a threat hunting service should evaluate the following:

1. No organisation is immune, regardless of size, vertical or location. Every organisation is a target, irrespective of where it is located and the vertical you operate in.
2. Threats are moving faster than ever before. Remember the speed at which threats are operating and evolving.
3. Therefore, threat hunting is now a must-have for every organisation, and no longer just a nice-to-have option.
4. Speed, scale and consistency are critical. Threat hunting needs to be able to be conducted with speed and scale. And that requires structured, repeatable processes, mature technologies, long-term visibility and threat hunters backed by deep expertise, knowledge and threat intelligence.
5. Structure your hunts using the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Panda Security Solutions come fortified with many ATT&CK techniques identified, thus enabling the security team to focus its efforts on dealing with security threats leveraging the well-defined information provided by the framework and extended by our cyber security team.
6. Capitalise on the opportunity. It's always easier to sell to existing customers and endpoint security services are no exception. Partners already offering security services will find  Panda Security’s EDR and Threat Hunting Services a natural extension to their current service offering.
7. If you cannot do this in-house, consider a threat hunting service. Finally, if you can't do this, make sure you partner with a vendor that can. Choosing the right one can simplify core service delivery and new managed security services over time.

The Threat Hunting Service included in Panda Security’s EDR solutions is a powerful tool that enables MSPs to add threat hunting as part of their offering. It allows the detection of threats before damage is done and improves defences against future attacks on their customers. Contact Panda Security Africa for further information on their threat hunting services.