Why Most Threat Hunts Are Just Rebranded IOC Sweeps

Let’s talk about “threat hunting” – the term that makes CISOs feel proactive and Red Teamers roll their eyes so far back they see their brainstem.

The Marketing Definition

According to cybersecurity marketing teams:

“Threat hunting is the proactive, hypothesis-driven search for adversaries in your environment to detect unknown threats before they cause harm.”

Sounds great. Feels strategic. Definitely gets budget approval.

The Reality in Most Orgs

Here’s what threat hunting actually looks like in 80% of companies:

  1. Download a Mandiant report with IOCs for the latest APT.
  2. Load them into your SIEM as hunting queries.
  3. Run the searches, see no hits.
  4. Publish a slide deck saying “No evidence of compromise found.”
  5. Go to lunch feeling like an elite cyber ninja.

Why That’s Just an IOC Sweep

  • You’re not forming hypotheses about attacker TTPs tailored to your environment.
  • You’re not hunting for behavioral patterns or anomalous activities indicative of any threat actor.
  • You’re matching known indicators like a glorified VirusTotal GUI.

That’s an IOC sweep. Valuable? Sometimes. But don’t call it a threat hunt. That’s like calling your daily phishing email deletion a counterintelligence operation.

What True Threat Hunting Looks Like

✅ Form a hypothesis:
"If an attacker phished one of our HR staff, what creds would they dump, where would they pivot, and what EDR evasion would they try?"

✅ Map to TTPs:
Use MITRE ATT&CK to identify realistic behaviors – not just hashes or IPs.

✅ Hunt for behaviors:
Run queries and analysis to look for evidence of credential dumping tools, suspicious PowerShell usage, lateral Kerberos ticket usage, etc.

✅ Test detections and gaps:
If your queries come back clean, validate by simulating those techniques to see if your detection pipeline even works. (Spoiler: it often doesn’t.)

✅ Document findings:
Include environment weaknesses, missing telemetry, and hypothesis validation results.

Why It Matters

Because:

  • Threat hunting should inform detection engineering.
    It’s about finding what your SIEM can’t see, not confirming what it already knows.

  • It proves resilience against real attacker behavior.
    Not just whether CrowdStrike blocks Mimikatz for the 5,000th time.

  • It closes visibility gaps.
    You learn what logs you’re missing or what alert logic fails silently.

Final Thoughts

💀 If your threat hunts never find anything, they aren’t threat hunts.

They’re compliance exercises. Checkbox cyber. Board-level placebo.

Next time someone brags about their “weekly threat hunt program,” ask them:

“Cool. What hypotheses did you test last week?”

Watch them squirm. Then call Purplehax.

Because we actually hunt threats, not just Google them.