Key Features of Cyber Threat Hunting Tools 

Threat hunting tools typically include the following cybersecurity capabilities.

Automated Threat Detection

Threat hunting tools use algorithms and machine learning models to identify anomalies and potential security incidents automatically. They scan through vast amounts of data, including network traffic, log files, and system activity, to detect behaviors that deviate from the norm. By automating threat detection, these tools reduce the time it takes to identify threats.

Data Collection and Aggregation

These tools gather data from various sources such as endpoints, servers, network devices, and security appliances, consolidating it into a unified platform. This data collection provides a holistic view of the organization’s IT infrastructure, enabling deeper analysis of threats. Aggregation allows threat hunters to correlate data from different systems and sources, enabling the identification of patterns and trends that may indicate a security incident.

Search and Query Capabilities

Search and query capabilities in threat hunting tools allow security analysts to probe the collected data for indicators of compromise, suspicious activities, or other anomalies. These features enable targeted searches using criteria such as timestamps, IP addresses, user activities, and file hashes.

Real-Time Monitoring

Threat hunting tools equipped with real-time monitoring continuously observe network traffic, system behavior, and user activities to identify suspicious patterns as they occur. This immediate insight allows organizations to react swiftly to potential threats, minimizing the window of opportunity for attackers.

Threat Intelligence Integration

Threat hunting tools can access external data sources to improve threat detection and analysis. They can incorporate information from threat intelligence feeds, databases of known malicious IP addresses, signatures of malware, and other indicators of compromise. This external data provides context and augments the tools’ ability to identify and understand potential threats.

Compliance and Auditing

Threat hunting tools help organizations adhere to regulatory requirements and internal policies. They provide detailed logging and reporting capabilities that document security events, actions taken by analysts, and system changes. This documentation is crucial for demonstrating compliance with standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.

Notable Threat Hunting Tools

1. Snowbit

Snowbit is a managed detection and response solution offering a combination of Coralogix’s advanced SIEM and Snowbit’s managed, expert security services. With proactive, 24/7 monitoring of your security events and posture, Snowbit is your extended security team, helping you to not only identify threats and incidents in real-time, but also resolve them within minutes.

• Powered by the Coralogix SIEM: Our in-stream log analysis enables real-time processing and threat detection, allowing you to analyze and act on security events as they happen.
• Unlimited Queries, Unlimited Retention: Store data in your own S3 bucket or other archive storage, enabling full log retention and analysis without query costs, so you never have to limit what you send due to budget concerns.
• Proactive Threat Defense: Receive 24/7 expert staffing for detection, investigation, and response for every security event across your network and cloud environments.
• Seamless Integration: Integrate with all of your data sources with 200+ quick start extensions, with pre-built parsing, alerting, and dashboards. 
• Real-Time Alerts: Resolve security issues in less than a minute from detection with our rich suite of 2,000+, out-of-the-box, yet fully customizable alerts that can automatically trigger defined remediation processes.

2. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is an enterprise security platform to protect network endpoints from cyber threats. This tool combines Windows 10’s embedded sensors with Microsoft’s cloud services to prevent, detect, and respond to attacks.

Key features:

• Endpoint behavioral sensors: Embedded within Windows 10, these sensors continuously monitor and report on endpoint activities to detect abnormal behaviors indicative of potential threats.
• Cloud security analytics: Uses big data, machine learning, and Microsoft’s threat intelligence to analyze collected data and generate actionable insights for threat detection and response.
• Threat intelligence: Integrates with Microsoft’s and partners’ threat intelligence databases to identify and respond to known attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures.
• Vulnerability management: Offers capabilities for managing and mitigating vulnerabilities across endpoints to reduce the attack surface.
• Automated investigation and remediation: Uses AI-driven processes to automatically investigate alerts and remediate threats, reducing the workload on security teams.

Source: Microsoft

3. VMware Carbon Black Endpoint

VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is an on-premises security solution to provide continuous endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities, especially suited for environments with offline, air-gapped, or disconnected systems. It allows security operations center (SOC) teams to detect, respond to, and remediate cyber threats by offering visibility over endpoint activities. 

Key features:

• Continuous visibility: Delivers insights into endpoint activities, allowing security teams to visualize and investigate security incidents with speed and precision.
• Scalable threat hunting: Uses custom and cloud-based threat intelligence, automated watchlists, and integrations to enable efficient threat hunting across even the largest enterprises.
• Rapid response: Provides real-time response capabilities to quickly contain and remediate threats, minimizing damage and ensuring business continuity.
• On-premises security: Specifically designed for secure, offline environments, ensuring that even air-gapped or disconnected systems are protected and monitored effectively.
• Threat intelligence integration: Uses aggregated threat intelligence from the Carbon Black Cloud to enhance detection and response strategies.

Source: VMware

4. SolarWinds Security Event Manager

SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) is a security information and event management (SIEM) tool to enhance an organization’s security posture and simplify compliance efforts. SEM provides centralized log collection, automated threat detection, and rapid response capabilities, making it useful to improve security without unnecessary complexity or high costs.

Key features:

• Centralized log collection and normalization: Aggregates logs from various sources, normalizes them for easy analysis, and provides a unified view of the IT environment to facilitate threat detection.
• Automated threat detection and response: Continuously monitors for suspicious activities and automatically responds to potential threats in real-time, reducing the impact of security incidents.
• Integrated compliance reporting tools: Simplifies compliance with built-in reporting tools that help organizations meet regulatory requirements like HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOX.
• Cyber threat intelligence: Integrates with threat intelligence feeds to enhance detection capabilities and keep the organization protected against emerging threats.
• Built-in file integrity monitoring: Monitors changes to critical files and systems, ensuring the integrity of sensitive data and aiding in the detection of unauthorized modifications.

Source: SolarWinds

5. CrowdStrike Falcon

CrowdStrike Falcon is a cybersecurity platform to provide organizations with proactive, intelligence-driven defense against cyber threats. Falcon leverages threat intelligence and 24/7 threat hunting capabilities to stop breaches before they cause harm.

Key features:

• 24/7 threat hunting with Falcon OverWatch: Delivers continuous, proactive threat hunting across endpoints, identity, and cloud environments. 
• Adversary intelligence: Provides detailed profiles of over 200 adversaries, including nation-states and eCrime groups. These profiles offer insights into adversaries’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), mapped to the MITRE ATT\&CK framework.
• Real-time vulnerability intelligence: Offers up-to-date information on vulnerabilities exploited by adversaries, enabling organizations to prioritize and address critical security gaps.
• Automated investigations and expert insights: Accelerates threat response with automated investigations and actionable insights from CrowdStrike’s intelligence experts.
• Intelligence-driven defense: Enhances the entire security stack by integrating threat intelligence directly into detection, prevention, and response workflows.

Source: CrowdStrike 

6. Splunk Enterprise Security

Splunk Enterprise Security is a SIEM solution that provides visibility, accurate threat detection, and enhanced operational efficiency for SOCs. It ingests, normalizes, and analyzes data from any source, enabling organizations to detect, investigate, and respond to threats. 

Key features:

• Visibility: Ingests and normalizes data from across the enterprise to provide visibility into all security events, allowing organizations to monitor their environment at scale with AI-powered capabilities.
• Risk-based alerting (RBA): Reduces alert volumes by up to 90% by attributing risk to users and systems and triggering alerts only when risk thresholds are exceeded.
• Unified threat detection, investigation, and response: Integrates workflows across detection, investigation, and response with Mission Control, coupled with Splunk’s security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solution for automated, intelligence-driven threat management.
• Curated detections: Offers over 1,500 out-of-the-box detections developed by the Splunk Threat Research Team, aligned with industry frameworks like MITRE ATT\&CK, NIST CSF, and Cyber Kill Chain.
• Scalable and flexible deployment: Provides an extensible data platform that can be deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments.

Source: Splunk

7. Rapid7 InsightIDR

Rapid7 InsightIDR is a SIEM solution for the cloud-first era, offering the scale and speed needed to protect hybrid environments. As an AI-driven, cloud-native platform, InsightIDR delivers actionable insights to help organizations detect, investigate, and respond to threats across their attack surface. 

Key features:

• Security information and event management (SIEM): Combines cloud-native scalability with analytics to provide visibility and control over your security operations.
• Endpoint detection and response (EDR): Monitors endpoint activities in real-time, enabling rapid detection and response to threats at the device level.
• User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA): Leverages AI-driven behavioral detections to identify anomalies and malicious activities based on user and entity behaviors.
• Embedded threat intelligence: Features a continually updated library of threat intelligence, mapped to the MITRE ATT\&CK framework, to ensure high-fidelity detection of emerging threats.
• Incident response and investigations: Provides investigative timelines that outline attack techniques, impacts, and recommended responses in a single, comprehensive view.

Source: Rapid7

8. YARA

YARA is a tool primarily for malware researchers to identify and classify malware samples by defining and applying rules based on textual or binary patterns. These rules, which describe characteristics of malware families, allow researchers to detect and categorize malicious files with precision. 

Repo: https://github.com/virustotal/yara

License: BSD-3-Clause license

GitHub stars: 8K+

Contributors: 200+

Key features:

• Customizable rule creation: Allows users to define malware characteristics using strings, wild-cards, regular expressions, and more, enabling detailed and specific pattern matching.
• Boolean logic for pattern matching: Supports complex boolean expressions in rules, making it possible to combine multiple conditions for more accurate detections.
• Cross-platform compatibility: Operates on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, ensuring that it can be utilized in a variety of environments.
• Command-line interface: Provides a straightforward command-line tool for writing and executing YARA rules directly on files and directories.
• Python integration: Offers the yara-python extension, allowing YARA rules to be embedded and executed within Python scripts, enhancing automation and integration into broader security workflows.

Source: GitHub

9. APT-Hunter

APT-Hunter is an open-source threat hunting tool for analyzing Windows event logs to detect advanced persistent threat (APT) movements. Built with a purple team mindset, APT-Hunter simplifies the process of uncovering suspicious activities hidden within Windows event logs. It is particularly useful for threat hunters, incident responders, and forensic investigators.

Repo: https://github.com/ahmedkhlief/APT-Hunter?tab=readme-ov-file

License: GPL-3.0 license

GitHub stars: 1.2K

Key Features:

• Advanced threat detection: Detects APT movements by analyzing Windows event logs based on events from previous APT attacks, helping to uncover potential threats before they escalate into major incidents.
• Comprehensive log analysis: Supports the collection and analysis of logs from various sources, including Sysmon, Security, System, PowerShell, Scheduled Task, WinRM, Terminal Services, and Windows Defender.
• Automated log collection: Includes automation scripts to collect essential logs in both CSV and EVTX formats.
• Regex-based parsing: Utilizes built-in libraries and Regex to parse and extract relevant fields from log files, allowing users to create custom use cases for threat detection.
• Severity-based event categorization: Categorizes events by severity to streamline filtering and enable analysts to focus on the most critical alerts.

10. BotScout

BotScout is a free service to help website owners and administrators combat automated web scripts, commonly known as “bots.” These bots scour the Internet, filling out forms with spam, dropping malicious links, and attempting to gain access to sites to exploit additional vulnerabilities. The result is often a polluted database, bogus registrations, and an increased workload for site administrators who must clean up the mess. 

Key features:

• Bot detection and blocking: Tracks and logs the names, IP addresses, and email addresses used by bots, enabling you to identify and block them before they can cause harm.
• Extensive bot database: Maintains a regularly scrubbed database of unique bot signatures, ensuring high accuracy in detecting and stopping bots without duplicating records.
• Simple API integration: Provides an easy-to-use API that allows you to check form submissions against the BotScout database, reducing the number of bots passing through by up to 99%.
• Free for most users: Available at no cost for personal, private, or non-commercial use. Large corporate users may be asked to pay a small fee to cover bandwidth costs.
• Sample code for easy implementation: Offers sample code that can be easily integrated into forums, contact forms, mailing lists, and other site features to enhance bot protection.

Conclusion

Threat hunting tools are essential for proactive cybersecurity defense, enabling organizations to detect and respond to advanced threats that traditional security measures might miss. By leveraging techniques such as behavioral analysis, machine learning, and real-time monitoring, these tools empower security teams to stay ahead of attackers. Effective threat hunting prevents breaches and strengthens the organization’s resilience against future attacks.

Learn more about Snowbit