06/11/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 06/11/2025 07:34
Threat hunting isn't just a buzzword anymore; it's a necessity. At RSA Conference 2025, one theme came through loud and clear: Cyberthreat hunting has matured, and the expectations surrounding it have evolved.
To understand what's really happening inside security teams, we conducted a survey with vetted cybersecurity professionals, all actively involved in incident response and security operations. Combined with numerous conversations at RSA, one thing became evident: Threat hunting isn't a niche activity for elite teams; it's a core discipline for any organization serious about cyber resilience.
Here are the top three takeaways for anyone looking to elevate their threat hunting capabilities.
Visibility is everything. Whether you're investigating suspicious behavior, tracking lateral movement, or verifying policy enforcement, you need access to complete, unfiltered data.
84 percent of surveyed security professionals said network visibility is critical to their threat detection and response process.
That's no surprise. The network offers a continuous, source-agnostic record of activity unlike endpoint logs or agent-based tools, which can be incomplete, manipulated, or bypassed entirely.
True threat hunting requires more than alerts. It requires transparency across the network-the kind of visibility that reveals not only what was flagged, but also what was missed.
Threat hunting isn't limited to what's happening right now. Some of the most valuable insights are found in what already happened, especially the things that weren't caught in real time.
84 percent of respondents said retrospective analysis of historical data is essential to their incident response process.
This is a critical point and consistent with the visibility requirement. Many common tools retain data only for short periods, or only when an alert is triggered. In other words, No Detection = No Historical Data. That model limits the ability to investigate subtle or stealthy threats that slipped through the cracks.
Effective threat hunting depends on the ability to go back in time to pivot from indicators, trace behaviors across systems, and reconstruct the full timeline of an attack, even when there was no alert.
Most organizations track mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR). But for threat hunters, the most important metric is often mean time to knowledge (MTTK)-how quickly they can understand what really happened. In many cases, threat hunting is a proactive action not associated with a past alert or event. In these cases, threat hunters rely on their experience or obtain a new piece of threat intelligence (for example, a new MITRE ATT&CK tactics, techniques, and procedures [TTP] notification or information from their Information Sharing and Analysis Center [ISAC]) to proactively look for signs of compromise, or investigate a hypothesis by conducting retrospective analysis of historical network metadata or packets.
Threat hunting isn't just about answering, "Is this malicious?" It's about asking:
The answers to these questions require more than alerts. They require context, continuity, and confidence-the ability to move from signal to story, and from assumption to action.
Threat hunting has become an essential part of modern cyberdefense. But it's only as effective as the tools, data, and context that support it. To enable truly proactive threat hunting, organizations need:
In a world where the threat landscape is constantly evolving, the ability to proactively uncover what others miss may be the most powerful capability your security team can develop.
For organizations looking to operationalize these principles, NETSCOUT's Omnis Cyber Intelligence delivers the capabilities that fill proactive threat hunting demands. With NETSCOUT Adaptive Threat Analytics, it provides continuous packet-level visibility and retrospective analysis at scale, helping teams uncover what happened, even when threats evade real-time detection.
Learn how NETSCOUT Omnis Cyber Intelligence can help by providing comprehensive network visibility with scalable deep packet inspection (DPI) to detect, investigate, and respond to threats more efficiently.