PROACTIVE THREAT DETECTION & INVESTIGATION
Threat Hunting
Built on Evidence.
Cyber Centaurs conducts proactive threat hunting to identify suspicious activity, persistence, credential misuse, lateral movement, and other indicators that may not have triggered existing security controls. We analyze endpoint, identity, cloud, and security telemetry to develop evidence-based findings about activity within the environment.
Confidential Consultation
WHEN TO HUNT
Look Beyond
the Existing Alerts.
Threat hunting can provide additional investigative visibility when an organization has reason to question whether existing security controls tell the complete story. Hunts can focus on specific hypotheses, suspicious behavior, known threat patterns, or broader indicators of compromise within the available telemetry.
Suspicious Activity Without a Confirmed Incident
Credential or Identity Concerns
Post-Incident Validation
New Threat Intelligence
High-Risk Environment or Business Event
Proactive Security Review
HUNT OBJECTIVES
Test the Hypothesis.
Follow the Evidence.
A threat hunt should begin with defined investigative questions and available telemetry rather than indiscriminate searching. The objective is to identify meaningful patterns, investigate suspicious activity, correlate evidence across sources, and determine whether escalation is warranted.
Develop the Hunt Hypothesis
Define the behavior, threat pattern, indicator, identity concern, or investigative question the hunt is designed to evaluate.
Search Available Telemetry
Examine relevant endpoint, identity, authentication, cloud, network, and security records for evidence associated with the hunt hypothesis.
Correlate Suspicious Activity
Evaluate relationships between systems, users, processes, connections, credentials, and other activity to distinguish meaningful patterns from isolated events.
Establish Findings
Document identified activity, supporting evidence, visibility limitations, unresolved questions, and whether additional investigation or incident response is warranted.
HUNTING TELEMETRY
Evidence Across the
Security Environment.
The effectiveness of a threat hunt depends on the telemetry available within the environment. Cyber Centaurs evaluates relevant evidence sources together to identify suspicious behavior and reconstruct activity in context.
Endpoint Telemetry
process execution
services
scheduled tasks
persistence
file activity
endpoint events
Identity & Authentication
user activity
authentication
MFA
privileged accounts
credential use
identity changes
EDR / XDR
endpoint detections
process relationships
network activity
security telemetry
historical events
investigative artifacts
Remote Access & Administration
RDP
VPN
remote tools
PowerShell
administrative utilities
remote sessions
Cloud & Microsoft 365
Entra ID
Microsoft 365
cloud authentication
mailbox activity
cloud storage
audit records
Network & Security Logs
firewalls
DNS
proxy
network connections
security alerts
other available telemetry
HUNT QUESTIONS
What Activity
Doesn't Belong?
Threat hunting is most useful when telemetry is examined against specific behavioral questions. The objective is to identify activity that warrants deeper investigation rather than treating every anomaly as malicious.
Is Persistence Present?
Look for services, scheduled tasks, startup mechanisms, remote tools, accounts, applications, or other activity that may support continued unauthorized access.
Are Credentials Being Misused?
Evaluate unusual authentication, privileged-account activity, credential use, MFA events, session behavior, and other identity indicators.
Is Lateral Movement Occurring?
Examine remote connections, administrative protocols, credential use, remote tooling, and relationships between systems that may indicate movement through the environment.
Is Suspicious Execution Occurring?
Evaluate process activity, scripts, command-line execution, administrative utilities, binaries, and other endpoint behavior relevant to the hunt.
Are Legitimate Tools Being Used Abnormally?
Investigate remote-management tools, PowerShell, scripting engines, administrative utilities, cloud applications, or other legitimate technologies used in unexpected ways.
Does the Activity Require Escalation?
Correlate available evidence to determine whether the identified activity is benign, suspicious, requires additional investigation, or supports escalation into incident response.
THREAT HUNTING PROCESS
Hypothesis to
Investigative Findings.
The hunt process is structured around a defined question, available telemetry, iterative investigation, evidence correlation, and clear findings concerning the activity identified.
01
Define the Hunt
Establish the hypothesis, scope, systems, identities, telemetry sources, time period, and investigative objectives.
02
Collect & Query Telemetry
Access and search relevant endpoint, identity, cloud, network, EDR, and other available security evidence.
03
Investigate Activity
Analyze suspicious processes, authentication, persistence, connections, remote activity, administrative tools, and other behaviors associated with the hypothesis.
04
Correlate & Validate
Compare activity across evidence sources, test alternative explanations, identify relationships, and determine which findings warrant escalation.
05
Report & Recommend
Document identified activity, supporting evidence, visibility limitations, unresolved questions, and recommendations for remediation, monitoring, additional hunting, or incident response.
HUNT FINDINGS
Turn Suspicious Activity Into
Actionable Findings.
A threat hunt should leave the organization with more than a collection of queries or alerts. Findings should explain what activity was identified, why it matters, what evidence supports the conclusion, and what should happen next.
Suspicious Activity Findings
Documentation of relevant processes, connections, authentication, persistence, identity activity, or other behavior identified during the hunt.
Reconstructed Activity
Timelines and relationships connecting users, systems, processes, accounts, or other relevant evidence.
Validated Indicators
Indicators or behaviors supported by available environmental evidence rather than external threat intelligence alone.
Visibility Limitations
Identification of missing telemetry, retention gaps, unavailable systems, or other factors affecting the conclusions.
Remediation Actions
Practical actions associated with identified weaknesses, persistence, account activity, tooling, or other findings.
Escalation Path
Clear indication when identified evidence supports deeper forensic investigation or incident-response activity.
ESCALATION
When a Hunt
Becomes an Incident.
If threat hunting identifies evidence of active or historical compromise, the investigation may need to transition into data breach and incident response. Preserving the evidence already identified can help accelerate that transition and avoid restarting the investigation from the beginning.
Preserve Identified Evidence
Protect relevant endpoint, identity, cloud, network, and security records associated with the suspicious activity.
Define the Incident Scope
Expand analysis to affected systems, accounts, persistence mechanisms, related activity, and other evidence sources.
Contain Supported Threat Activity
Use investigative findings to inform appropriate containment and remediation actions.
Transition to Incident Response
Escalate into a formal forensic and incident-response engagement when the evidence supports additional investigation.
WHY CYBER CENTAURS
Technical Depth.
Investigative Judgment.
Threat hunting is investigation, not alert review.
Cyber Centaurs combines incident response, digital forensics, cybersecurity expertise, and evidence-driven analysis to investigate suspicious activity across endpoints, identities, cloud environments, and security telemetry.
DFIR-Informed Hunting
Threat hunting is informed by real incident-response and forensic investigation techniques rather than relying solely on automated detections.
Evidence Correlation
Endpoint, identity, cloud, network, and security telemetry are analyzed together to develop context around suspicious activity.
Behavior-Focused Investigation
The hunt examines persistence, credential use, execution, lateral movement, remote access, and other behaviors associated with adversary activity.
Clear Escalation Path
When evidence supports compromise, findings can transition directly into deeper forensic investigation and incident response.
THREAT HUNTING FAQ
Practical Questions
Before a Threat Hunt.
Threat hunting depends on the investigative objective, available telemetry, retention, environment size, security tooling, and the behavior being evaluated. These questions address common considerations before a hunt begins.
What is cyber threat hunting?
Threat hunting is a proactive investigative process that searches available environmental telemetry for suspicious or malicious activity that may not have triggered existing security controls. Hunts are typically guided by hypotheses, behaviors, indicators, or specific investigative questions.
How is threat hunting different from antivirus, EDR, or MDR?
Security products and monitoring services generate detections based on configured rules, analytics, signatures, and behavior. Threat hunting uses available telemetry to investigate specific hypotheses and activity patterns that may require human analysis beyond existing alerts.
Does a threat hunt prove our environment is clean?
No. A threat hunt can identify suspicious activity within the scope, time period, systems, and telemetry available for analysis. It cannot establish that no compromise exists anywhere in the environment or outside the visibility provided by the available evidence.
What data is needed for a threat hunt?
The required evidence depends on the hunt objective. Sources may include endpoint telemetry, EDR or XDR records, identity and authentication logs, Microsoft 365 or cloud audit data, firewall logs, DNS, VPN, remote-access activity, and other available security telemetry.
Can threat hunting identify compromised accounts?
Threat hunting can evaluate suspicious authentication, privileged-account activity, credential use, MFA events, identity changes, sessions, and related activity. Whether a compromised account can be conclusively established depends on the evidence available.
What happens if the hunt identifies active compromise?
If evidence supports active or historical compromise requiring deeper investigation, the hunt can transition into incident response. Relevant evidence should be preserved and the investigative scope expanded according to the activity identified.
How often should threat hunting be performed?
The appropriate frequency depends on the organization's risk profile, environment, available telemetry, threat exposure, security program, and the Cyber Centaurs offering selected. A threat-hunting plan should be scoped around the organization's objectives and the evidence available for review.
Can threat hunting be performed remotely?
Yes. Threat hunting is commonly performed remotely through authorized access to endpoint, identity, cloud, network, EDR, and other security telemetry available within the environment.
THREAT HUNTING INQUIRY
Discuss a
Threat Hunt.
Tell us briefly about the environment, security concern, telemetry available, and what you want the hunt to evaluate. A member of the Cyber Centaurs team will review your inquiry and follow up directly.
Confidential inquiry. Please do not submit credentials, security logs, indicators, network diagrams, or other sensitive evidence through this form.