Use Case: Threat Hunting & GreyNoise

Summary

Threat Hunters have to spend an inordinate amount of time searching through lists of IOCs, logs, sandbox files, and more just to find a thread that could lead them to useful information. And even then, they can’t be too sure that their findings are indeed accurate. GreyNoise can help alleviate some of this pain by helping Threat Hunters save time and find the needle in the noise. 

The Problem(s) with Threat Hunting

Threat hunting takes time. Threat hunters spend a significant portion of their time searching through security logs to try to find evidence that a system has been compromised. After running searches in their SIEM, threat hunters end up with lists of potential Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) that they then need to sort, filter, and narrow down. Whether they’re investigating a specific incident or searching for patterns of malicious activity, processing this data efficiently can have a tremendous impact on investigating incidents in a timely manner.

Threat hunters also have to deal with data integrity and usefulness; knowing if they can trust their external threat intelligence is crucial to any investigation. Threat hunters working with thousands of log sources in their SIEM must correctly identify IoC outliers and rule out data that is irrelevant. Filtering the noise first makes the remaining data more interesting and impactful. 

We can’t promise to make all of your dreams come true, but we can promise that we will save you time with data you can trust.  

GreyNoise provides visibility and deep context on network traffic by identifying the intention of observed activity on internet wide scans. This lets threat hunters focus on events that are targeting their organization and reduce time wasted on triage of harmless or irrelevant events, giving time back to dedicate to hunting adversaries.

GreyNoise Overview

Proactive threat hunting uses a variety of methods and data sources in order to drive a hunting campaign. Hunting for unknowns in an environment can be challenging without the right set of data. Every day hundreds of thousands of devices scan, crawl, and probe every routable IP address on the internet looking for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. GreyNoise provides additional information about activity from a particular IP address or ASN and tracks trending or anomalous activity as threats emerge. Anomalous behavior quickly gives analysts a way to review traffic observed by GreyNoise sensors that deviates from previously observed activity. Being able to conceptualize an attacker's early-stage attack infrastructure as threats emerge provides a window of opportunity for threat hunters to start targeted and specific investigation. Why are actors looking for these devices suddenly? Are similarly vulnerable devices in my organization and exposed to the internet?

GreyNoise’s internet-wide sensor network passively collects packets from hundreds of thousands of IPs seen scanning the internet every day. Companies like Shodan and Censys, as well as researchers and universities, scan in good faith to help uncover vulnerabilities for network defense. Others scan with potentially malicious intent. GreyNoise analyzes and enriches this data to identify behavior, methods, and intent, giving analysts the context they need to take action.

Additionally, GreyNoise tracks IP’s associated with common business applications (e.g. Microsoft O365, Google Workspace, and Slack), or services like CDNs and public DNS servers. These applications communicate through unpublished or dynamic IPs making it difficult for security teams to track. Without context, this harmless behavior distracts security teams from investigating true threats.

Data collected by GreyNoise sensors can be used to enrich log events on perimeter and public, internet-facing devices in your environment in addition to helping determine if this activity is something that is happening across the internet or is something that may be targeted specifically at your organization. Data related to common business applications is often used to filter outbound traffic leaving your network and can be useful for determining traffic that is going to known services so that your focus can be on the connections going to unknown IPs.

This scan and attack data can be applied in a number of ways depending on the outcomes desired by a security team. Whether it is a large organization with robust infrastructure or MSSP’s providing threat hunting services to their customers, many teams are using different tools in order to build a robust cyber threat intelligence organization to support internal teams or customers. Collaboration is key to providing more relevant information to GreyNoise users and the security community at large. IP’s observed by the GreyNoise sensor network are enriched with additional information sources, such as, if an IP is a known Tor exit node or if the IP is used by a commercial VPN provider. GreyNoise participates in information sharing organizations and contributes data to strategic partnerships in an effort to provide and receive information on emerging threats as soon as they come into play.

Features Overview

Listening to the internet allows GreyNoise to uncover unique behaviors and TTPs. Sensors capture vulnerability lifecycles to show when scanners are looking for opportunities to exploit recently announced vulnerabilities. By capturing data in this way GreyNoise data generally has a low false positive rate by viewing the traffic inbound to the sensor network. Using this data allows for 

  • The GreyNoise visualizer provides an easy way to quickly lookup IP addresses to identify the intention of an IP address, as well as query the GreyNoise dataset to better track vulnerabilities and infrastructure.
  • The GreyNoise Query Language (GNQL) provides users with a powerful tool to search the GreyNoise data set to help cyber threat intelligence (CTI) teams, threat hunters, vulnerability researchers, etc. find emerging threats, compromised devices, and other interesting trends. GNQL provides threat hunters with a powerful and flexible way to query data observed by GreyNoise sensors.
  • Bulk search: Threat hunters can copy and paste security logs, results pages, or lists of IP addresses into the GreyNoise Analysis page to analyze the IPs included in this content. This is the fastest way to quickly identify IP addresses that have been observed by GreyNoise, filtering out false positives from other tools by removing IP’s associated with known business services, and finding IP’s that have not been seen by GreyNoise sensors.
  • Alerting: Organizations often want to monitor their own IP space or to be notified of particular threats/CVEs to inform users on activity targeted toward their products. Alerts automatically notify users when specific conditions are observed by GreyNoise sensors.
  • Trends in GreyNoise show the frequency analysis of internet behavior. Trending or anomalous behavior based on the activity observed by GreyNoise sensors gives teams a good starting point for investigating systems based on trending vulnerabilities, or spikes in activity observed of actors looking to identify different services and devices.

Integrations

From the largest organizations to the smallest security teams, typically have some method of centralizing their logs from systems and applications. Additionally as teams scale additional tools such as SOAR platforms or TIPs might be leveraged to better track and act upon indicators gathered. Collecting IOC’s is only half of teh battle; making the data actionable in an organization can be accomplished using integrations to further enrich data used for hunting and investigations. 

  • Companies that are using a SIEM often need to quickly triage alerts so that they can provide context to analysts on where to focus their efforts on which alerts to respond to first. This can be challenging without additional context on how IP addresses are being used.
  • Data can be enriched in the SIEM to either identify opportunistic activity or quickly filter out events that are not targeting the organization in order to better hunt through different data sources.
  • Additionally, threat feeds enriched in a TIP can be fed into a SIEM to enrich logs and alerts, provide additional details to pivot on for further hunting, or easily filter out events generated by mass scanning to quickly focus on relevant data.
  • For ad hoc investigation that involve anomalies or developing a body of evidence, users can or run queries in their TIP or SIEM to gain insights into observed activity for an IP address or gather additional indicators to use in a hunt.
  • Organizations ingesting open source and commercial threat feeds require additional context into the behavior of a particular IP address to efficiently prioritize threats by severity. Building a relevant threat intel operation with up-to-date information can be challenging, expensive, and time consuming. GreyNoise’s integrations easily provide data enrichment within your TIP and help eliminate the noise and false positives CTI teams are apt to find when ingesting disparate intelligence sources.
  • Organizations are typically ingesting multiple data feeds into their TIP.
  • These can be either free feeds maintained by the security community or commercial feeds provided by vendors
  • Free feeds can be a challenge to maintain and find things that are actionable and relevant to an organization
  • Once this data is fed into a TIP and enriched with GreyNoise analysts can find what IP’s are part of common scanning infrastructure, or identify common actors that often end up in free feeds
  • Additionally, this data can be combined with indicators gathered by an organization from their own tools to build out additional threat lists to identify adversary TTP’s and infrastructure.
  • Data enriched in a TIP can then be used in conjunction with a SIEM platform for providing additional context when an alert is triggered.
  • Security automation platforms provide additional options for integrating GreyNoise into standard workflows. One of the main challenges is determining how much of the response process should be automated. By identifying IP addresses that GreyNoise has observed, playbooks can be built to use this information and take more decisive actions. 
  • Further hunting can be automated via a SOAR platform by quickly searching for indicators provided by GreyNoise. Creating a playbook for threat hunting can leverage organization data as well as emerging threat data to use when querying a SIEM or data lake. This data can form the basis of a deeper hunt conducted by an analyst using the data that was automatically gathered.

Extras

Key GN Features or Capabilities:

Analysis of similarity / differences in IPs through the GreyNoise IP Dest and Timeline features + other existing features (bulk search / analysis, IP similarity, IP comparison)

  • Bulk search (Analysis): Threat hunters can copy and past security logs, results pages, or lists of IP addresses into the GreyNoise Analysis page to analyze the IPs included in this content.
  • GreyNoise returns a categorized list of the IPs in the submitted content, separated into groups to help threat hunters quickly triage and focus on the most important data:
  1. Malicious-intent scanner IPs
  2. Benign-intent scanner IPs
  3. Unknown-intent scanner IPs
  4. Common business services (RIOT) IPs
  5. Unidentified IPs that are NOT scanning the internet, and may represent targeted attacks
  • Information that GreyNoise provides on an IP address’s observed activity is derived from the location data of GreyNoise’s own sensor network. This means that this information can be provided without needing a supplemental geo-IP database. GreyNoise can natively and with a higher fidelity answer the question of where these scans are targeting.
  • Hunters can pivot from GreyNoise Trends into pairing Tag activity with individual IP’s and their IP Destination. This can be further paired with Timeline information to get a deeper context into attacker behavior.
  • Searching Dest IP from the CLI using GNQL:
  • GNQL Query in CLI showing destination’s of IP’s observed with scanning activity that relates to DB2 scanners in the past 7 days
  • With ease, analysts can operate the GreyNoise command line tool with GreyNoise’s simple GNQL query language to further investigate IPs. Seen in the screenshot above, most of the activity observed by GreyNoise sensors relating to DB2 scanners over the last seven days is fairly evenly distributed across sensors in 41 different countries.
  • This location data might provide additional information for incident responders that threat hunters must produce to correlate active threat hunting with actionable data from an active investigation. It can be paired with the functionality of IP Similarity and Timeline data.
  • Alerting (using GN Alerts functionality) to be notified of particular threats/CVEs to inform users on activity targeted toward their products.
  • Manual IP lookup in the GreyNoise Visualizer
  • The GreyNoise Query Language (GNQL) provides users with a powerful tool to search the GreyNoise data set to help cyber threat intelligence (CTI) teams, threat hunters, vulnerability researchers, etc. find emerging threats, compromised devices, and other interesting trends. GNQL provides threat hunters with a powerful and flexible way to query data observed by GreyNoise sensors.

  • Overall Trends Page in Viz (1/4/2023)

  • Anomalies Tab in the Trends Page in Viz (1/4/2023)

  • Most Active Tab in the Trends Page in Viz (1/4/2023)


  • Most Recent Tab in the Trends Page in Viz (1/4/2023)

  • Core Use Case: Investigations and Hunting
  • Primary Users: Threat hunters, Cyber Threat Intelligence Teams, Adversarial Intelligence Teams, Vulnerability Management, Higher Tier SOC Analysts, Security Researchers

Threat Hunters have to spend an inordinate amount of time searching through lists of IOCs, logs, sandbox files, and more just to find a thread that could lead them to useful information. And even then, they can’t be too sure that their findings are indeed accurate. GreyNoise can help alleviate some of this pain by helping Threat Hunters save time and find the needle in the noise. 

The Problem(s) with Threat Hunting

Threat hunting takes time. Threat hunters spend a significant portion of their time searching through security logs to try to find evidence that a system has been compromised. After running searches in their SIEM, threat hunters end up with lists of potential Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) that they then need to sort, filter, and narrow down. Whether they’re investigating a specific incident or searching for patterns of malicious activity, processing this data efficiently can have a tremendous impact on investigating incidents in a timely manner.

Threat hunters also have to deal with data integrity and usefulness; knowing if they can trust their external threat intelligence is crucial to any investigation. Threat hunters working with thousands of log sources in their SIEM must correctly identify IoC outliers and rule out data that is irrelevant. Filtering the noise first makes the remaining data more interesting and impactful. 

We can’t promise to make all of your dreams come true, but we can promise that we will save you time with data you can trust.  

GreyNoise provides visibility and deep context on network traffic by identifying the intention of observed activity on internet wide scans. This lets threat hunters focus on events that are targeting their organization and reduce time wasted on triage of harmless or irrelevant events, giving time back to dedicate to hunting adversaries.

GreyNoise Overview

Proactive threat hunting uses a variety of methods and data sources in order to drive a hunting campaign. Hunting for unknowns in an environment can be challenging without the right set of data. Every day hundreds of thousands of devices scan, crawl, and probe every routable IP address on the internet looking for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. GreyNoise provides additional information about activity from a particular IP address or ASN and tracks trending or anomalous activity as threats emerge. Anomalous behavior quickly gives analysts a way to review traffic observed by GreyNoise sensors that deviates from previously observed activity. Being able to conceptualize an attacker's early-stage attack infrastructure as threats emerge provides a window of opportunity for threat hunters to start targeted and specific investigation. Why are actors looking for these devices suddenly? Are similarly vulnerable devices in my organization and exposed to the internet?

GreyNoise’s internet-wide sensor network passively collects packets from hundreds of thousands of IPs seen scanning the internet every day. Companies like Shodan and Censys, as well as researchers and universities, scan in good faith to help uncover vulnerabilities for network defense. Others scan with potentially malicious intent. GreyNoise analyzes and enriches this data to identify behavior, methods, and intent, giving analysts the context they need to take action.

Additionally, GreyNoise tracks IP’s associated with common business applications (e.g. Microsoft O365, Google Workspace, and Slack), or services like CDNs and public DNS servers. These applications communicate through unpublished or dynamic IPs making it difficult for security teams to track. Without context, this harmless behavior distracts security teams from investigating true threats.

Data collected by GreyNoise sensors can be used to enrich log events on perimeter and public, internet-facing devices in your environment in addition to helping determine if this activity is something that is happening across the internet or is something that may be targeted specifically at your organization. Data related to common business applications is often used to filter outbound traffic leaving your network and can be useful for determining traffic that is going to known services so that your focus can be on the connections going to unknown IPs.

This scan and attack data can be applied in a number of ways depending on the outcomes desired by a security team. Whether it is a large organization with robust infrastructure or MSSP’s providing threat hunting services to their customers, many teams are using different tools in order to build a robust cyber threat intelligence organization to support internal teams or customers. Collaboration is key to providing more relevant information to GreyNoise users and the security community at large. IP’s observed by the GreyNoise sensor network are enriched with additional information sources, such as, if an IP is a known Tor exit node or if the IP is used by a commercial VPN provider. GreyNoise participates in information sharing organizations and contributes data to strategic partnerships in an effort to provide and receive information on emerging threats as soon as they come into play.

Features Overview

Listening to the internet allows GreyNoise to uncover unique behaviors and TTPs. Sensors capture vulnerability lifecycles to show when scanners are looking for opportunities to exploit recently announced vulnerabilities. By capturing data in this way GreyNoise data generally has a low false positive rate by viewing the traffic inbound to the sensor network. Using this data allows for 

  • The GreyNoise visualizer provides an easy way to quickly lookup IP addresses to identify the intention of an IP address, as well as query the GreyNoise dataset to better track vulnerabilities and infrastructure.
  • The GreyNoise Query Language (GNQL) provides users with a powerful tool to search the GreyNoise data set to help cyber threat intelligence (CTI) teams, threat hunters, vulnerability researchers, etc. find emerging threats, compromised devices, and other interesting trends. GNQL provides threat hunters with a powerful and flexible way to query data observed by GreyNoise sensors.
  • Bulk search: Threat hunters can copy and paste security logs, results pages, or lists of IP addresses into the GreyNoise Analysis page to analyze the IPs included in this content. This is the fastest way to quickly identify IP addresses that have been observed by GreyNoise, filtering out false positives from other tools by removing IP’s associated with known business services, and finding IP’s that have not been seen by GreyNoise sensors.
  • Alerting: Organizations often want to monitor their own IP space or to be notified of particular threats/CVEs to inform users on activity targeted toward their products. Alerts automatically notify users when specific conditions are observed by GreyNoise sensors.
  • Trends in GreyNoise show the frequency analysis of internet behavior. Trending or anomalous behavior based on the activity observed by GreyNoise sensors gives teams a good starting point for investigating systems based on trending vulnerabilities, or spikes in activity observed of actors looking to identify different services and devices.

Integrations

From the largest organizations to the smallest security teams, typically have some method of centralizing their logs from systems and applications. Additionally as teams scale additional tools such as SOAR platforms or TIPs might be leveraged to better track and act upon indicators gathered. Collecting IOC’s is only half of teh battle; making the data actionable in an organization can be accomplished using integrations to further enrich data used for hunting and investigations. 

  • Companies that are using a SIEM often need to quickly triage alerts so that they can provide context to analysts on where to focus their efforts on which alerts to respond to first. This can be challenging without additional context on how IP addresses are being used.
  • Data can be enriched in the SIEM to either identify opportunistic activity or quickly filter out events that are not targeting the organization in order to better hunt through different data sources.
  • Additionally, threat feeds enriched in a TIP can be fed into a SIEM to enrich logs and alerts, provide additional details to pivot on for further hunting, or easily filter out events generated by mass scanning to quickly focus on relevant data.
  • For ad hoc investigation that involve anomalies or developing a body of evidence, users can or run queries in their TIP or SIEM to gain insights into observed activity for an IP address or gather additional indicators to use in a hunt.
  • Organizations ingesting open source and commercial threat feeds require additional context into the behavior of a particular IP address to efficiently prioritize threats by severity. Building a relevant threat intel operation with up-to-date information can be challenging, expensive, and time consuming. GreyNoise’s integrations easily provide data enrichment within your TIP and help eliminate the noise and false positives CTI teams are apt to find when ingesting disparate intelligence sources.
  • Organizations are typically ingesting multiple data feeds into their TIP.
  • These can be either free feeds maintained by the security community or commercial feeds provided by vendors
  • Free feeds can be a challenge to maintain and find things that are actionable and relevant to an organization
  • Once this data is fed into a TIP and enriched with GreyNoise analysts can find what IP’s are part of common scanning infrastructure, or identify common actors that often end up in free feeds
  • Additionally, this data can be combined with indicators gathered by an organization from their own tools to build out additional threat lists to identify adversary TTP’s and infrastructure.
  • Data enriched in a TIP can then be used in conjunction with a SIEM platform for providing additional context when an alert is triggered.
  • Security automation platforms provide additional options for integrating GreyNoise into standard workflows. One of the main challenges is determining how much of the response process should be automated. By identifying IP addresses that GreyNoise has observed, playbooks can be built to use this information and take more decisive actions. 
  • Further hunting can be automated via a SOAR platform by quickly searching for indicators provided by GreyNoise. Creating a playbook for threat hunting can leverage organization data as well as emerging threat data to use when querying a SIEM or data lake. This data can form the basis of a deeper hunt conducted by an analyst using the data that was automatically gathered.

Extras

Key GN Features or Capabilities:

Analysis of similarity / differences in IPs through the GreyNoise IP Dest and Timeline features + other existing features (bulk search / analysis, IP similarity, IP comparison)

  • Bulk search (Analysis): Threat hunters can copy and past security logs, results pages, or lists of IP addresses into the GreyNoise Analysis page to analyze the IPs included in this content.
  • GreyNoise returns a categorized list of the IPs in the submitted content, separated into groups to help threat hunters quickly triage and focus on the most important data:
  1. Malicious-intent scanner IPs
  2. Benign-intent scanner IPs
  3. Unknown-intent scanner IPs
  4. Common business services (RIOT) IPs
  5. Unidentified IPs that are NOT scanning the internet, and may represent targeted attacks
  • Information that GreyNoise provides on an IP address’s observed activity is derived from the location data of GreyNoise’s own sensor network. This means that this information can be provided without needing a supplemental geo-IP database. GreyNoise can natively and with a higher fidelity answer the question of where these scans are targeting.
  • Hunters can pivot from GreyNoise Trends into pairing Tag activity with individual IP’s and their IP Destination. This can be further paired with Timeline information to get a deeper context into attacker behavior.
  • Searching Dest IP from the CLI using GNQL:
  • GNQL Query in CLI showing destination’s of IP’s observed with scanning activity that relates to DB2 scanners in the past 7 days
  • With ease, analysts can operate the GreyNoise command line tool with GreyNoise’s simple GNQL query language to further investigate IPs. Seen in the screenshot above, most of the activity observed by GreyNoise sensors relating to DB2 scanners over the last seven days is fairly evenly distributed across sensors in 41 different countries.
  • This location data might provide additional information for incident responders that threat hunters must produce to correlate active threat hunting with actionable data from an active investigation. It can be paired with the functionality of IP Similarity and Timeline data.
  • Alerting (using GN Alerts functionality) to be notified of particular threats/CVEs to inform users on activity targeted toward their products.
  • Manual IP lookup in the GreyNoise Visualizer
  • The GreyNoise Query Language (GNQL) provides users with a powerful tool to search the GreyNoise data set to help cyber threat intelligence (CTI) teams, threat hunters, vulnerability researchers, etc. find emerging threats, compromised devices, and other interesting trends. GNQL provides threat hunters with a powerful and flexible way to query data observed by GreyNoise sensors.

  • Overall Trends Page in Viz (1/4/2023)

  • Anomalies Tab in the Trends Page in Viz (1/4/2023)

  • Most Active Tab in the Trends Page in Viz (1/4/2023)


  • Most Recent Tab in the Trends Page in Viz (1/4/2023)

  • Core Use Case: Investigations and Hunting
  • Primary Users: Threat hunters, Cyber Threat Intelligence Teams, Adversarial Intelligence Teams, Vulnerability Management, Higher Tier SOC Analysts, Security Researchers

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