CYBER HUNTER Project
A Practical Guide to Threat Hunting: From First Hypothesis to Real-World Investigations
Threat Hunting starts with a question, not an alert.
You do not need to already be a Threat Hunter to start thinking like one.
CYBER HUNTER Project is a practical guide designed both for people taking their first steps into Threat Hunting and for cybersecurity professionals who want to sharpen the way they hunt, investigate and build detections.
The book starts with the foundations: what Threat Hunting really is, how a hunter thinks, how to build a hypothesis, what evidence to look for, and how Threat Hunting differs from Threat Detection. From there, it moves progressively into real hunting investigations, showing how those ideas work against actual security telemetry.
If you are starting from zero, CYBER HUNTER Project gives you a structured path into the field without assuming that you already know how to hunt.
If you already work in a SOC, Incident Response, Detection Engineering, Threat Intelligence or Cybersecurity, it gives you new hunting ideas, investigation techniques and practical examples that you can adapt to your own environment.
And if you are already a Threat Hunter, the goal is to help you go further: challenge assumptions, build stronger hypotheses, correlate evidence differently, discover new hunting opportunities and turn successful investigations into reusable detections.
Across Email, Endpoints, Networks, Threat Intelligence, Identity, Software and Cloud Applications, CYBER HUNTER Project takes you through practical scenarios involving phishing, ransomware behaviour, suspicious authentication, network activity, threat intelligence feeds, cloud collaboration, device code authentication and many other hunting opportunities.
Inside of the book, you will find:
• Threat Hunting fundamentals explained from the ground up • A practical approach to building Hunt Hypotheses • Real, self-contained Threat Hunting investigations • Evidence-driven investigation strategies • Detection Opportunities derived from successful hunts • Detection Libraries with additional hunting ideas • Companion KQL queries for Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Sentinel • MITRE ATT&CK mappings and reference material • Practical Threat Intelligence and IOC/IOA analysis • Ideas you can adapt to build your own hunts
The companion queries use KQL and Microsoft security telemetry, but the hunting methodology is intentionally vendor-neutral. The objective is not to memorize queries. It is to understand why a hunt works, what evidence makes it valuable, and how to reproduce that thinking on your own platform.
Start with the fundamentals. Learn through real hunts. Build your own hypotheses. Improve the way you investigate.
Whether this is your first Threat Hunting book or you already hunt threats every day, this project is designed to become a practical reference you can keep beside you and return to whenever you need your next hunting idea.
The logic is the point, not the dialect.
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About
About the Book
Threat Hunting starts with a question, not an alert.
You do not need to already be a Threat Hunter to start thinking like one.
CYBER HUNTER Project is a practical guide designed both for people taking their first steps into Threat Hunting and for cybersecurity professionals who want to sharpen the way they hunt, investigate and build detections.
The book starts with the foundations: what Threat Hunting really is, how a hunter thinks, how to build a hypothesis, what evidence to look for, and how Threat Hunting differs from Threat Detection. From there, it moves progressively into real hunting investigations, showing how those ideas work against actual security telemetry.
If you are starting from zero, CYBER HUNTER Project gives you a structured path into the field without assuming that you already know how to hunt.
If you already work in a SOC, Incident Response, Detection Engineering, Threat Intelligence or Cybersecurity, it gives you new hunting ideas, investigation techniques and practical examples that you can adapt to your own environment.
And if you are already a Threat Hunter, the goal is to help you go further: challenge assumptions, build stronger hypotheses, correlate evidence differently, discover new hunting opportunities and turn successful investigations into reusable detections.
Across Email, Endpoints, Networks, Threat Intelligence, Identity, Software and Cloud Applications, CYBER HUNTER Project takes you through practical scenarios involving phishing, ransomware behaviour, suspicious authentication, network activity, threat intelligence feeds, cloud collaboration, device code authentication and many other hunting opportunities.
Inside of the book, you will find:
• Threat Hunting fundamentals explained from the ground up
• A practical approach to building Hunt Hypotheses
• Real, self-contained Threat Hunting investigations
• Evidence-driven investigation strategies
• Detection Opportunities derived from successful hunts
• Detection Libraries with additional hunting ideas
• Companion KQL queries for Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Sentinel
• MITRE ATT&CK mappings and reference material
• Practical Threat Intelligence and IOC/IOA analysis
• Ideas you can adapt to build your own hunts
The companion queries use KQL and Microsoft security telemetry, but the hunting methodology is intentionally vendor-neutral. The objective is not to memorize queries. It is to understand why a hunt works, what evidence makes it valuable, and how to reproduce that thinking on your own platform.
Start with the fundamentals. Learn through real hunts. Build your own hypotheses. Improve the way you investigate.
Whether this is your first Threat Hunting book or you already hunt threats every day, this project is designed to become a practical reference you can keep beside you and return to whenever you need your next hunting idea.
The logic is the point, not the dialect.
Author
About the Author
My name is Sergio Albea, and I'm from Valls, a tiny town in Spain famous for building the best human castles 🏰 (castells) — which is probably where I first learned that the strongest things are built one careful layer at a time, and never alone. From there to Barcelona, and five years ago to Switzerland 🇨🇭, where I work as a CSOC Security Expert at SWITCH (the Swiss NREN), doing threat analysis and response for the Education and Research sector.
More than twenty years working with Microsoft technologies have taken me across different areas — messaging, identity and access, information protection, DevOps, cloud and security. But the part I care about most has never changed: staying proactive, learning and sharing what I learn. Almost everything I know came from people who shared their knowledge with me, and I try to do the same.
During the last three years, Threat Hunting has also taken me to conferences and workshops across Europe. Every talk has been an opportunity to share an idea, discuss it with other hunters and come back home having learned something new.
Contents
Table of Contents
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