Cyberattackers have a reputation for striking unannounced. If you wait around till they get to you, there’s a high chance that you would suffer huge losses. Being proactive by hunting for threats and fixing them before they gain momentum keeps you several steps ahead of these attackers.

While threat hunting is effective in securing your system against external invasion, some misconceptions can make it counterproductive. Here are a few of them.

1. Anyone Can Perform Threat Hunting

In terms of hunting for animals in the forest, anyone with a gun can set out for it. But there’s a high chance they’ll come back empty-handed because they lack the skills to aim and shoot their prey. The same thing applies to cyber threat hunting. Anyone with IT skills may have basic knowledge of threat hunting, but when it comes down to core skills and utilizing the right tools, they may be limited.

The best threat hunters have advanced threat intelligence and monitoring skills with foresight for detecting vulnerabilities. They can identify various kinds of threats and their mitigation strategies. Armed with the right tools, they make the most of their time and resources, prioritizing threats to avoid fatigue.

2. Threat Hunting Focuses on Attacks

Many people believe that threat hunting is all about the action i.e., constantly chasing and combating threat actors. While that’s a key element, it usually comes after a lot of intel gathering, observation, and examination of the digital environment to understand its security disposition.

A traditional hunter doesn’t just set out to hunt. They plan, mapping out specific areas to focus on and the best ways to lure and kill their prey. In the same vein, a cyber threat hunter develops a pre-hunting plan which focuses on researching and planning before taking action. After the main hunting event, they also create a post-hunting plan where they document their findings.

3. Threat Hunting Is a Preventive Measure

Since threat hunting is proactive security activity that precedes cyberattacks, people often mistake it for a prevention technique, but that’s not accurate. Preventive security measures are the policies, processes, and tools you implement to stop threats from entering your system. Threat hunting, on the other hand, is about fishing out the threats that already found their way into your network.

Preventive security initiatives precede threat hunting. Even when you have strong defenses, your system can become vulnerable—this is known as residual risks. Threat hunting helps to identify the residual risks that exist in your network despite the security measures on the ground.

4. AI Can Substitute Humans in Threat Hunting

There’s a misconception that artificial intelligence (AI) can substitute humans in threat hunting, but this remains a theoretical perspective and not practical. In as much as threat actors have specific behavioral patterns that AI systems can master, these change over time as attackers constantly invent new strategies. Threat hunting needs the human touch to detect the slightest details that aren’t programmed into an AI system.

Combining AI with human input enhances threat hunting. The tools can generate intel that humans will investigate further to gain more insights into threat actors. Sending instant alerts and notifications are also key roles that AI software can play in managing vulnerabilities.

5. Threat Hunting and Penetration Testing Are the Same

Penetration testing and threat hunting share a similarity in discovering vulnerabilities, but they aren’t the same. In penetration testing, you wear the shoes of a cybercriminal to perform ethical hacking on your system, so you can identify its weaknesses, and then resolve them.

Even when you are thorough with your pen-testing, you could miss some hidden threats. Instead of conducting the test severally at a particular time, you can implement threat hunting to discover vulnerabilities that still exist in your system. Combining both techniques further strengthens your security.

Develop Strong Security Defenses With Threat Hunting

Threat hunting is a defense mechanism that you can implement from a vantage point. Since you do it beforehand, you can take your time to be detailed and articulate. This approach enables you to discover the tiniest vulnerabilities and test-run your defenses to ensure they are up to par.