Monitoring Alerts You. Hunting Assures You.
Are you confident that a quiet dashboard means you're secure or is a threat just hiding well?
It’s easy to feel reassured when your dashboards are quiet. There are no critical alerts, no flashing red indicators, no apparent anomalies. For many organizations, this calm is taken as a sign that all is well, and the environment is secure. Those who’ve lived through breaches know that silence can be deceptive. The absence of alerts doesn’t mean the absence of threats.
Most modern security controls are designed to detect known threats. They rely on signatures, behavioral rules, or correlation logic to recognize malicious activity. Controls catch what they’re built to see. However, today’s threats are often engineered to avoid exactly that.
Sophisticated threats don’t always set off alerts. Some will sneak around security controls by taking advantage of blind spots in your defenses. Those blind spots tend to be a misconfiguration, lack of enforcement, or gap in visibility across the network. A history of breaches shows that attackers’ dwell times can vary from hours to months or even years before being detected or felt by the business.
This is why a quiet dashboard shouldn't be your only indicator of security. The controls you rely on are vital, but their effectiveness shouldn’t be assumed, it should be verified. When subtle threats go unnoticed, the cost can show up later in stolen data, regulatory consequences, or lost trust.
That’s the challenge: finding what’s designed to avoid detection.
Threat hunting is a proactive approach to cybersecurity where analysts will go looking for evidence of malicious events or suspicious activities. Hunters analyze telemetry and system activity in your controls, looking for subtle signs that something isn’t quite right. It’s less about one item, and more about investigating a chain of activities through deep understanding. A good hunter focuses on validating that nothing got through, rather than assuming the controls caught everything.
For example, imagine a compromised user account logs into a cloud application. There are no alerts, because the login used a valid password and MFA. This account downloads a large amount of SharePoint data, accesses new resources, and executes sophisticated commands. Each activity might be logged, but none of them alone raise alerts. Threat hunting is the process of connecting these dots; identifying subtle indicators that might not activate alerts on their own but together highlight unnecessary risks.
A hunting mindset matters today as the security landscape has shifted. Threats are no longer solely viruses or password attacks. They’re using your cloud services, accounts, and tools against you. And they’re doing it without alarms.
Even the best controls and most capable teams can’t catch everything on their own. Technology has inherent blind spots. Managed services operate within predefined boundaries. Automation can only go so far.
These aren’t theoretical limitations, they are operational realities. This is why a different approach is needed, one that actively looks for what automation misses. Security today demands more than silence, it requires verification.
So, when your dashboards are quiet, how do you know nothing's there?
In the next post, we look at another common assumption: that threat hunting is already covered by your MSSP or SOC.