PRO+ Premium Content/Information Security

Edgy, creative and confident. These are the qualities of a good threat hunter, Deneen DeFiore, CISO of GE Aviation, has found as she develops the aircraft suppliers' threat hunting program in Evendale, Ohio. "We're looking for someone who has the confidence to take a risk and prove out their hypothesis about a threat." GE Aviation started its threat hunting program informally four years ago, around the time of the now-infamous Target breach. Five to seven threat hunters now work full time at GE Aviation, and most of the major business units at General Electric have about the same number of threat hunters working to actively identify threats and automate searches. Just what is a threat hunter? They are people who search for the traces attackers leave behind in an IT environment, usually before any alerts of their activities are generated by security devices. The best threat hunters use threat intelligence, custom tools or threat hunting products -- Endgame, Infocyte, Sqrrl Data -- to identify threats and then automate searches ...