What Is Cloud Threat Hunting? A Beginner's Guide

Introduction to cloud threat hunting

With cloud adoption firmly established, this digital landscape has become a cornerstone of innovation — and an increasingly attractive target for cybercriminals. In fact, the CrowdStrike 2025 Global Threat Report revealed a 26% rise in cloud environment intrusions in 2024, highlighting an urgent need for more advanced and proactive cloud security strategies.

Cloud threat hunting is the proactive process of identifying potential cyber threats within cloud environments before they evolve into full-blown security breaches. Threat hunting differs from automated detection tooling by using human experts to actively search for anomalies and suspicious behaviors to find unknown, hidden threats that have evaded detection. Think of it as a digital game of hide-and-seek where highly skilled analysts leverage deep security expertise and advanced tools to uncover stealthy attackers lurking in the cloud.

Why is cloud threat hunting important?

Cloud complexity

Cloud environments bring unparalleled scalability and flexibility, but they also introduce unique security challenges that traditional on-premises approaches are ill-equipped to handle. In the cloud, there’s no clear perimeter to defend. The complexity of modern workloads — like containerized applications, microservices, and distributed systems — demands new strategies to stay ahead of evolving threats.

The constant flux of cloud environments creates potential security blind spots. These gaps in visibility can provide adversaries with the perfect hiding places to infiltrate and move undetected. This is why actively hunting for threats within your cloud environment is so crucial.

Cloud-conscious threat actors

As organizations push the boundaries of cloud innovation, adversaries are doing the same. According to the CrowdStrike 2024 Global Threat Report, incidents involving cloud-conscious threat actors — those who exploit cloud-specific vulnerabilities and features — increased by an alarming 110% from 2022 to 2023. These attackers are not only targeting cloud workloads but developing sophisticated methods to manipulate the very features that make the cloud so powerful, such as auto-scaling, shared resources, and identity-based access.

This evolution in attacker tactics underscores the growing need for proactive defenses. Cloud threat hunting plays a critical role in addressing these challenges by allowing organizations to detect and respond to threats that traditional tools might miss. By combining human expertise with advanced analytics, threat hunting provides the visibility and agility needed to outsmart adversaries.

Benefits of cloud threat hunting

By taking a proactive approach with cloud threat hunting, organizations can shine a light on hidden risks, stay one step ahead of sophisticated attackers, and build a stronger, more resilient cloud environment. Here’s why it matters:

• Enhanced visibility: Effective cloud security starts with visibility into every corner of your cloud environment , from workloads and applications to potential vulnerabilities. Cloud threat hunting gives you that visibility, helping you uncover risks that could otherwise stay buried in the complexity of dynamic, ever-changing cloud setups.

• Early detection of sophisticated attacks: Threat actors aren’t waiting for an invitation — they’re finding creative ways to infiltrate cloud environments. With cloud threat hunting, you can catch adversary activity like lateral movement or zero-day attacks and stop threat actors before they have a chance to do serious damage.

• Improved cloud security posture: Security isn’t just about reacting; it’s about evolving. Cloud threat hunting helps you continuously identify and fix weaknesses — whether it’s a misconfigured asset, a potential insider threat, or an emerging attack technique — so you’re always a step ahead.

Use cases for cloud threat hunting

Cloud threat hunting can uncover a range of threats that might otherwise remain undetected. Some common use cases include:

• Insider threats: Detect unusual behavior from internal users who may be abusing their access privileges or acting maliciously.

• Misconfigured cloud resources: Identify improperly configured assets — like open storage buckets or excessive permissions — that could expose sensitive data to attackers.

• Privilege escalation attempts: Spot attackers trying to gain elevated permissions within your cloud environment to access critical systems or data.

• Lateral movement: Uncover adversaries navigating laterally within an organization’s cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid infrastructure to expand their reach and evade detection.

• Anomalous behavior: Recognize deviations from normal operational patterns, such as unexpected data transfers or unusual login locations, which could indicate a breach in progress.

By addressing these use cases, cloud threat hunting equips organizations to stay ahead of evolving threats and ensure their cloud environments remain secure.

How cloud threat hunting works

Threat hunting process

Cloud threat hunting is a methodical process that combines expert knowledge, cutting-edge tools, and understanding of adversary tradecraft to stay ahead of potential security risks. Here’s a breakdown of how it works:

• Planning and strategizing: Everything begins with a theory. Security experts develop educated guesses about where threats might be hidden based on data collected on known risks or suspicious patterns. These hypotheses drive the hunt and help guide hunters to the most vulnerable areas to focus their efforts.

• Data collection and analysis: With hypotheses in hand, the next step is to gather data from various cloud resources. This could include logs, network traffic, user activity, and system configurations. Once collected, the data is analyzed for any irregularities or patterns that could indicate suspicious activity.

• Threat identification: Using specialized tools, techniques, and their own expertise, threat hunters look for indicators of compromise (IOCs) — the digital footprints of an attacker. This might include strange login attempts, suspicious data transfers, or unexpected changes to cloud resources.

• Response and remediation: Once a threat is identified, it’s time to act. Hunters take immediate steps to contain the threat, neutralize its impact, and fix any vulnerabilities that allowed it in. After the threat is removed, teams conduct a postmortem to learn from the incident, adjust security measures to close any gaps, and refine their approach for next time.

Tools and techniques

Successful cloud threat hunting relies on a range of powerful tools and techniques to detect, analyze, and respond to threats. Here’s a look at some of the common tools:

• Threat intelligence: Staying ahead of adversaries means being in the know. Threat intelligence feeds provide up-to-date information on emerging threats, known attack methods, and compromised IP addresses. This real-time data helps hunters track new security risks and adjust their strategies accordingly.

• CNAPPs: Cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) are built specifically to secure cloud-native architectures, such as containers and microservices. CNAPPs provide visibility, continuous monitoring, and protection for dynamic, ever-evolving cloud environments.

• SIEM platforms: Cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) platforms are essential for aggregating and analyzing security data across your cloud environment. They help identify suspicious activity by correlating logs, alerts, and events.

Best practices

Effective cloud threat hunting is an ongoing process of refinement and improvement. Here are a few key practices to keep in mind:

Prioritize investigations based on risk
Threat hunting efforts should be driven by risk, focusing first on the areas that would have the greatest impact on the organization if they were attacked. This means identifying critical assets, high-value targets, and high-risk areas within the cloud environment. By understanding where sensitive data resides and which applications are business-critical, threat hunters can focus their efforts and reduce the likelihood of overlooking major risks.

Continuously improve
Threat hunting is a dynamic process. As the cloud environment and attack techniques evolve, so must the threat hunting methodology. This requires regularly revisiting and refining hypotheses, updating threat models, and adapting to new attack vectors. Regular postmortem analyses after each hunt, and learning from both successful and unsuccessful hunts, is essential for keeping the strategy fresh and relevant. Additionally, setting aside dedicated time for proactive hunting is critical — it's not just about reacting to alerts but about actively seeking out potential threats before they surface.

Leverage automation
The volume and complexity of data in cloud environments make automation invaluable. Threat hunters leverage tools like SIEM platforms and CNAPPs to ingest and analyze large datasets at scale. These platforms help speed up analysis and automate routine tasks such as data parsing, log aggregation, and the identification of patterns and anomalies that might indicate a potential threat. This helps threat hunters focus on higher-level analysis, identifying subtle outliers, hidden indicators of attack (IOAs), and suspicious activities that might not trigger automated alerts. Automation accelerates the hunting process, allowing analysts to sift through massive amounts of data quickly and efficiently while enhancing their ability to spot emerging threats that could otherwise go undetected.

Collaborate with other security teams
Threat hunting doesn’t exist in isolation. Successful cloud threat hunters should work closely with other teams across the organization, such as incident response, cloud security, and DevOps teams. Collaboration ensures that insights gained during hunts can be integrated into broader security initiatives and operational practices. This teamwork can also lead to the development of new detection techniques or remediations, as each team brings a unique perspective and expertise to the table.

Key players and skills in cloud threat hunting

Threat hunters and security teams

Cloud threat hunters work closely with other security professionals to ensure a comprehensive defense against cyber threats. After identifying potential threats, hunters collaborate with various teams to ensure swift and effective remediation. If a threat is confirmed and requires immediate action, cloud threat hunters can hand off their findings to incident response teams. These teams take over, executing predefined playbooks to contain the threat, mitigate damage, and restore services. Their role is critical in responding to incidents quickly and minimizing downtime.

Cloud security analysts are also key partners in this process. Once a hunter uncovers a threat, security analysts can analyze the threat in detail, assess the potential impact, and work on refining the security controls to prevent future incidents. This may involve tightening access controls, improving monitoring practices, or enhancing network segmentation.

By collaborating with the broader security team, threat hunters help ensure that the organization's defenses are continuously improving and adaptable to emerging threats. This teamwork forms the backbone of a proactive cloud security strategy.

Threat hunting skills

To be effective at cloud threat hunting, a diverse set of skills is essential. For example, cloud threat hunters must possess a strong understanding of cloud architectures and platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Their knowledge of cloud infrastructure and hybrid environments is crucial, as the dynamic, scalable nature of cloud computing makes it significantly more complex than traditional on-premises environments.

In addition, cloud threat hunters must be proficient in threat analysis, incident response, and the use of cloud-native security tools. Being able to identify cloud-specific vulnerabilities and understanding the intricacies of containerized applications, microservices, and identity-based access are critical to uncovering sophisticated threats. Cloud threat hunters also need to be adept at using specialized tools like SIEM platforms, CNAPPs, and threat intelligence feeds.

The rapid evolution of cloud environments demands that threat hunters continuously upskill and adapt. As cloud services and security tools change, so too must the techniques used to hunt for threats. This requires threat hunters to have a combination of technical knowledge and a passion for continual learning.

Challenges in multi-cloud environments

Cloud threat hunting in multi-cloud environments presents unique complexities that significantly impact visibility and detection. In multi-cloud setups, workloads and data are distributed across multiple cloud providers, each with its own security protocols, tools, and management systems. This creates visibility gaps where critical data or suspicious activity can go unnoticed, especially as cloud environments scale dynamically.

Effective threat hunting in multi-cloud environments requires specialized skills. Threat hunters must be adept at managing and correlating data from a range of cloud platforms, each with its own security tools, APIs, and interfaces. This means hunters need deep expertise in cloud-native security, cross-platform integrations, and real-time threat detection across various providers. Finding professionals with this expertise can be challenging, especially as the demand for skilled cloud threat hunters continues to rise.

CrowdStrike’s approach to cloud threat hunting

CrowdStrike reimagines security operations with an AI-powered, cloud-native platform that delivers cutting-edge protection. The CrowdStrike Falcon® platform unifies endpoint security, identity protection, and cloud security, and this is further enriched with world-class threat intelligence and 24/7 managed threat hunting to stop adversaries in their tracks. This ensures customers are protected with unified, proactive defenses that adapt to even the most sophisticated adversaries.

CrowdStrike® Falcon Adversary OverWatch™ is a managed threat hunting service that combines AI-driven analytics, industry-leading threat intelligence, and unrivaled human expertise to proactively detect and disrupt sophisticated cyber threats.

By leveraging industry-first unified visibility across cloud environments, identities, and endpoints, CrowdStrike experts operate 24/7 to effectively hunt threats across domains, monitoring for compromised users in cloud attacks and tracking lateral movement between endpoints and the cloud.

These threat hunters have access to unprecedented telemetry from not only your environment but from every CrowdStrike customer worldwide. This global visibility gives CrowdStrike the ability to identify patterns and threats that even the most advanced in-house teams cannot replicate. Customers that rely solely on in-house threat hunting lack the breadth and scale of this collective insight, which is crucial for staying ahead of today’s sophisticated adversaries.

Falcon Adversary OverWatch breaks down silos to hunt adversaries everywhere, significantly reducing the cost and complexity of in-house threat hunting and accelerating response times. And when the threat hunting team identifies a threat, it informs not only the affected customer but other customers who might be at risk, providing detailed data and remediation guidance. 

The Falcon Adversary OverWatch team’s diligent work helps bolster your security posture and feeds back into the Falcon platform, transforming new threats into known ones. This continuous cycle enhances overall effectiveness, delivering a security framework that's constantly adapting to emerging threats, optimizing threat detection capabilities, and ensuring your defenses evolve in tandem with adversary tactics.

• Explore how CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security provides comprehensive protection across your clouds, applications, and data. Learn more!
  
• See firsthand how CrowdStrike’s cloud threat hunting capabilities can safeguard your environment. Request a hand-on demo.
  
• Need guidance on implementing an effective cloud threat hunting strategy? Contact us today!