Design of Cyber Threat Hunting Games: A Case Study

Cyber Threat Hunting is an emerging cyber security activity. Recent studies show that, although similar actions like threat hunting are being actively practiced in some organizations, security administrators and policy-makers are far from being satisfied with their effectiveness. Most security professionals lack expertise in data analytics while most people with data analytics skills lack security knowledge. To understand the necessity of threat hunting education at the university level, we organized a Threat Hunting Competition on campus with synthetically generated logs. In this paper, we identify skills needed for cyber threat hunting, describe the data generation process as well as the usage of logs to teach threat hunting at universities.

Remarks:

I worked on this project with Dr. Nazmus Sakib Miazi who was a Ph.D. student at UNC Charlotte at that time. Dr. Bill Chu and Dr. Mohamed Shehab guided us in this project for validating the research questions and their expertise in cybersecurity research.