Threat Hunting: 10 Ways Tanium Makes it Fast, Flexible and Unified

Cyber threat hunting is more challenging — and important — than ever. After all, cybercriminals are constantly evolving their threats to evade detection. The average cost of a security incident is nearly $9 million, and finding and responding to threats before they strike has become a board-level concern.

Unfortunately, most CISOs still struggle to find threats hiding in their environment. They typically use point solutions that market themselves as “silver bullets.” Still, these tools are only effective against known threats and ultimately fail to deliver the accurate, automated threat hunting and remediation they promise.

The result: Most CISOs have invested heavily in endpoint security tools yet still cannot confidently answer the most basic question — “Are we good?”

Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Tanium gives you a fast, flexible and unified approach to threat hunting. With Tanium, you can quickly discover, investigate and contain both known and unknown threats before they spread across your network. And in this blog, we’ll explore the ten ways Tanium improves threat hunting.

Let’s dig in.

The top 10 ways that Tanium improves cyber threat hunting

When you perform threat hunting with Tanium, you will:

1. Create a complete, real-time picture of your environment, so threats have nowhere to hide

With traditional tools, CISOs often work from an incomplete picture of their environment and do not know how many endpoints they have, where those endpoints are located or who is using them.

As a result, cybercriminals are able to hide in modern environments for days, weeks or months — during which they advance their attacks, build their foothold and only strike when it’s too late to stop them.

With Tanium, you will find every endpoint in your environment in minutes, collect a large volume of real-time threat data from each of your endpoints, and discover threats that other tools would miss.

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2. Collect granular threat data from your endpoints, software and users

With traditional tools, CISOs often have to hunt for threats and investigate in-progress attacks by searching through partial logs and endpoint artifacts that take hours to stream to the cloud.

As a result, CISOs must try to understand what attack they are suffering and how to stop it using stale, incomplete data — keeping the security team one step behind the attacker and blind to the full scope of their campaign.

With Tanium, you will collect a wealth of granular threat data directly from the compromised endpoints — in real-time — including user logins and behavior, and native artifacts that point to the root cause of an incident.

3. Identify open endpoint vulnerabilities and map complex lateral movement pathways

With traditional tools, CISOs struggle to collect accurate information on the current state of each of their endpoints, and how those endpoints connect to each other.

As a result, CISOs often hold countless endpoint vulnerabilities and pathways for lateral movement in their environment — giving attackers an open door to breach their environment and rapidly compromise multiple assets.

With Tanium, you will identify every open endpoint vulnerability in your environment, visualize your environment’s complex lateral movement paths, and discover the shortest path attackers can take to your crown jewels.

4. Remediate endpoint vulnerabilities and close lateral movement pathways in seconds

With traditional tools, CISOs take weeks or months to apply patches, update software and properly configure their assets to harden their environment against known exploits and close unnecessary internal attack vectors.

As a result, many CISOs are unable to close the known endpoint vulnerabilities and lateral movement pathways they know about in their environment, and are forced to accept a high level of security risk.

With Tanium, you will manage policy, maintain hygiene, and change all of your endpoints to a state of known good in minutes — closing the vulnerabilities and pathways you discover as soon as you identify them.

5. Proactively hunt for known or unknown threats across your environment in seconds

With traditional tools, CISOs reactively monitor for threats that either conform to known attack signatures, or that otherwise make enough “noise” to make themselves known.

As a result, many CISOs only know they are under attack after receiving an alert from their monitoring tools — often after the attacker has already dwelled in their environment for hundreds of days and built a foothold.

With Tanium, you will proactively search for arbitrary heuristics and Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) across your environment in seconds, and proactively discover both known and unknown threats early in their attack pattern.

6. Respond to threats you discover from the same console

With traditional tools, when CISOs discover a threat, they must switch from their threat hunting tools to their incident investigation and response tools — and often lose operator context and break their integrations along the way.

As a result, many CISOs fail to fully remediate the threats they find, and leave an attacker present in their environment, allowing the attacker to regroup, rebuild their foothold and rapidly strike again.

With Tanium, you can switch from threat hunting modules to incident investigation and response modules within the same agent, platform, and console, creating a seamless workflow from hunting to full remediation.

7. Unify your IT operations, security and risk teams under a single platform

With traditional tools, IT operations, security and risk teams often work from their own data and solutions, and perform their own segment of the threat hunting, response and remediation lifecycle from siloes.

As a result, these teams often disagree on the current state of the environment, they prioritize different threats to respond to and remediate, and they cannot validate the findings and efforts of other teams.

With Tanium, your IT operations, security and risk teams can work from a single shared dataset and platform that retrieves artifacts for security operations center (SOC) and incident response (IR) teams, scopes and remediates lateral attack movement, and validates the applications of policy and controls.

8. Take a “swiss army knife” approach to threat hunting and response

With traditional tools, CISOs rely heavily on automated tools that focus on detecting and deflecting known threats and threat patterns, or that utilize limited machine learning models that work best against predictable attacks.

As a result, CISOs struggle to hunt for, detect, understand, and respond to threat actors that constantly evolve their methods, devices, and strategies — and remain vulnerable to the growing volume of unknown attack patterns.

With Tanium, you will give your teams a flexible toolset designed to discover, investigate, and resolve previously-unknown attack patterns, while retaining the ability to quickly and easily manage known threats.

9. Streamline threat hunting and eliminate tool sprawl

With traditional tools, CISOs must deploy an ever-growing stack of single-use point solutions to mitigate each new vulnerability, attack pattern, threat vector, and exploitable asset class that emerges from their environment.

As a result, CISOs are forced to pour more and more budget, person-hours and infrastructure into their threat hunting, response and remediation capability — just to maintain an insufficient security posture.

With Tanium, you will gain every critical threat hunting, response and remediation feature you need from a single agent that can run from a single zero-infrastructure instance — reducing overhead while improving outcomes.

10. Measurably improve your ability to shut down attackers — fast

CISOs struggle to investigate and remediate threats with traditional tools and fail to fully secure large portions of their endpoint environments.

With Tanium, CISOs have reduced their mean time to investigate (MTTI) threats by 90%, reduced their mean time to remediate (MTTR) threats by 90%, and achieved 99% security tooling coverage across their modern endpoint environments.

As one Tanium customer explained, “With Tanium, our cybersecurity team can remotely check any endpoint and invoke a response procedure if necessary. They can also check every additional endpoint, globally, to help ensure the threat has not spread. This entire process takes less than four hours.”

In sum: Tanium gives you every critical workflow and piece of real-time data that you need to shine a light on your entire environment, to find the threats lurking within it, and to remediate those threats at scale, in minutes.

Bring Tanium to your organization

The difference is clear.

You cannot perform effective threat hunting across your modern endpoint environment with traditional tools. But with Tanium, you will make it fast, flexible, and unified — no matter how large and complex your environment is.

Learn more about Tanium’s Incident Response solution and request a free trial today.