Cybersecurity can often seem intimidating for IT teams. After all, things like “threat hunting,” “red teaming,” and “blue teaming” are not used in IT operations. On the other hand, just because these words are terms of art doesn’t mean that they’re activities you don’t do already. You’re probably already using log data as part of your IT operations incident response.

It’s time again for another meeting with senior leadership. You know that they will ask you the hard questions, like “how do you know that your detection and response times are ‘good enough’?” You think you’re doing a good job securing the organization. You haven’t had a security incident yet. At the same time, you also know that you have no way to prove your approach to security is working. You’re reading your threat intelligence feeds.

It’s no secret that cyber attacks are on the rise. Not only are they becoming more frequent, but the malicious actors who mount these attacks are constantly improving their skills and evolving the tools in their arsenals. Protecting your organization is challenging at best; especially since we measure the return on investment for cybersecurity as ‘preventing losses’ instead of ‘increasing revenue.’

In today's environment, security teams face a pervasive threat landscape, with the expectation that some threat actors will be successful in bypassing perimeter defenses. To deal with this, security teams must learn how to actively hunt down threats, both outside and inside the perimeter, using solutions, such as Sumo Logic’s Cloud SIEM Enterprise and Continuous Intelligence Platform.

Today’s enterprise networks are heterogeneous, have multiple entry points, integrate with cloud-based applications, offer data center delivered services, include applications that run at the edge of the network, and generate massive amounts of transactional data. In effect, enterprise networks have become larger, more complex, and more difficult to secure and manage.

Security and IT teams may be loathe to admit it, but security has historically been mostly a reactive affair. Security engineers monitored for threats and responded when they detected one. They may have also taken steps to harden their systems against breaches, but they didn’t proactively fight the threats themselves. That is changing as more and more teams add threat hunting as one pillar of their cybersecurity strategies.

Threat hunting is emerging as a must-have addition to cybersecurity strategies. By enabling organizations to find and mitigate threats before they ever touch their networks or systems, threat hunting provides the basis for a more proactive security posture – and one that delivers higher ROI on security tools and processes. How can businesses actually add threat hunting to their security arsenals? That’s where solutions like Sumo Logic's Cloud SIEM come in.

At Splunk, we’re constantly on the hunt for new and emerging threats — tirelessly developing detection techniques to zero in on bad actors, while sharing key intelligence around cybercrime activity. But because threat intelligence can relate to so many different things — ranging from spear phishing campaigns to dark web dealings — it can be a challenge to cover and define all the specifics of what (or who) to look out for.