You Don't Choose Between Airbags and Seatbelts. Why Are You Choosing Between Monitoring and Hunting?

We have challenged conventional security wisdom: Your SOC isn't hunting. Your MSSP's Target Operating Model (TOM) is outdated. You are paying for 24/7 hunting coverage you don't need.

Now the practical question: If continuous monitoring and offset hunting are both essential, how do they work together?

Defense in Depth for SecOps

Most security leaders understand the concept of defense in depth for technology, which involves multiple layers so that if one fails, others can catch the threat. That same principle needs to apply to your operational models.

In essence, your MSSP's 24/7 SOC continuously monitors for known threats, which generate alerts. You offset that with external threat hunting services that periodically investigate threats that don't trigger alerts. Neither replaces the other. Both are essential.

What Your MSSP Does Best

Your SOC needs to continue doing its part in your resiliency journey:

• Real-time alert monitoring – Analysts watch security tools 24/7 for suspicious activity that requires immediate investigation.
• Incident response – Analysts rapidly triage alerts, determine severity, and contain active threats.
• Known threat detection – They identify attack patterns that trigger automated alerts.

This is reactive security. Reactive defense is essential, as it requires a rapid response when threats generate alerts. The problem isn't that your MSSP does this work, but that this work is all most organizations have.

What Offset Hunting Provides

Independent threat hunting operates differently to offset how rapidly the threat landscape shifts:

• Hypothesis-driven investigation – Hunters start with questions like, "Did a threat breach security controls before the penetration testing outcomes?" and methodically investigate for evidence.
• Historical analysis – They examine logs from weeks or months ago to find threats that never generated alerts.
• Blind spot discovery – They identify detection gaps, validate controls, and uncover attack techniques your monitoring wasn't designed to catch.

Threat hunting is proactive security for the blue team. It validates whether your controls are blocking when it really matters.

How the Integration Works

The hybrid threat hunting model with your MSSP should create a feedback loop. In the simplest of overviews:

• Findings Delivery: Hunters deliver findings around threats discovered, control gaps identified, and detection improvements.
• Detection Improvement: Your MSSP updates detection controls based on observations from hunting activities. Coverage expands to address blind spots.
• Feedback Loop: The cycle repeats. SOC alert patterns inform the following hypotheses for hunting. Each engagement validates that improvements are working.

Real-World Integration Example

Imagine the real-world integration for a low-risk tolerance organization that seeks to use both full-time monitoring and a quarterly threat hunting service.

Months 1-3: Your MSSP monitors your environment, detecting phishing attempts and malware. Everything appears normal from an alert perspective.

Month 4: A short hunting engagement discovers a compromised service account accessing sensitive files for the last 60 days. The activity used proper credentials and authorized tools, but EDR had been disabled.

Deliverable: Hunters provide findings about the compromised account, document the detection gap, and deliver queries showing how to identify similar credential abuse patterns.

Post-Hunt: Your MSSP implements the recommendations and continues to monitor for unusual file access from service accounts and credential usage anomalies.

Month 5-7: Your SOC catches two similar attempts early because the new detection rules trigger alerts. This shows the team that they now monitor what was previously invisible.

Month 8: The next hunting engagement investigates different hypotheses related to cloud infrastructure and supply chain access. The cycle continues.

The Vendor-Neutral Advantage

When seeking threat hunting services, independence from technology vendors should be a critical factor.

When your MSSP also sells security tools, hunting naturally gravitates toward validating those tools. When consultants push specific technologies, findings lead to product recommendations. Some MSSPs worry that finding threats outside the SOC analysis will make their service appear inadequate; they don't inform the customer.

Independent hunting services that don't sell technology bring different value: they are tool-agnostic, work with your existing security stack, share all queries and logic openly, and focus on finding threats rather than positioning products.

Findings from hunts should be used to improve your existing investments rather than replacing them.

What This Means for Your Budget

The hybrid model doesn't require massive new budget allocation:

• Continuous costs apply for 24/7 monitoring, as covered by your MSSP contract, which includes alert-based operations.
• Periodic costs are incurred for quarterly independent threat hunting services, which are typically a fraction of the costs associated with continuous monitoring.
• Total coverage improves by filling gaps rather than duplicating existing coverage.

Many organizations discover they are already paying for hunting they are not getting. They buried hunting in MSSP contracts under "advanced threat detection," but that never includes hypothesis-driven investigation.

What Comes Next

Understanding how monitoring and hunting complement each other is essential. Understanding the concept is different from verifying that your provider is delivering both.

How do you know if your MSSP is truly capable of proactive hunting? What questions expose delivery gaps?

Next, we'll provide specific questions your Managed Security Service Provider probably can't answer and why those answers matter.

About the Series: This is Part 4 of a six-part series that examines the gap between how security operations are delivered and how modern threats actually operate. We're building a practical framework to complement your existing security investments.

Specialized services focus on offset threat hunting that works alongside your MSSP. We share all queries and findings because our value isn't in hoarding techniques; it's in discovering threats that monitoring alone can't see. No vendor partnerships. No technology sales. Just focused on hunting and defense validation. Learn more at focusedhunts.com

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