Most SOC teams don't have dedicated threat hunters. You've got three analysts covering 24/7, a backlog of 500 unreviewed alerts, and someone just asked if you can "proactively hunt for threats" with your "spare time."
There's a way to hunt threats systematically without burning out your team or letting alerts pile up. It requires a routine that fits into gaps, not one that creates new work on top of existing chaos.
Key Takeaways
- Threat hunting doesn't require dedicated headcount—it needs dedicated time blocks
- A 4-hour weekly routine beats sporadic "when we have time" hunting attempts
- Focus hunts on high-value targets: privileged accounts, crown jewels, and internet-facing assets
- Document every hunt with a one-page template so you build institutional knowledge
- Small, consistent hunts catch more threats than ambitious quarterly projects that never finish
Why Traditional Threat Hunting Fails in Lean SOCs
Large security teams have dedicated threat hunters who spend 40 hours a week looking for hidden adversaries. Small teams don't have that luxury.
The typical failure pattern: Your team decides to "start threat hunting." Someone picks an ambitious hypothesis. They spend two weeks building complex queries. Then an incident happens, hunting gets dropped, and nobody picks it back up for months.
Sporadic hunting doesn't work. You lose context between sessions. Queries break when data sources change. Nobody remembers what you already checked.
A repeatable weekly routine solves this. Four focused hours every week, on the same day, at the same time. Treat it like patching—non-negotiable maintenance, not optional extra work.
The routine needs structure: hypothesis selection, data gathering, analysis, and documentation. Rinse and repeat. Small wins compound faster than big projects that stall.
Monday Morning: Pick Your Target (30 Minutes)
Start your threat hunting process by choosing what to investigate. Don't pick random ideas—focus on areas where attackers actually hide.
High-value hunting targets:
- Privileged account activity (domain admins, service accounts, cloud admin roles)
- Crown jewel systems (customer databases, financial systems, source code repos)
- Internet-facing assets (VPNs, web apps, email gateways)
- Recent security alerts your team closed as "benign"
That last one is critical. Attackers disguise malicious activity as normal behaviour. Hunt through your closed tickets for patterns you might have missed.
Keep a backlog of hunt ideas. When you read about a new attack technique, add it to the list. When an analyst mentions something suspicious but not quite alert-worthy, write it down.
Monday morning, pull one item from the backlog. Write a simple hypothesis: "Are there any service accounts authenticating from unusual locations?" or "Did any user access more than 50 files in the last week?"
Simple hypotheses complete faster than complex ones. You want answers by Friday, not next quarter.
Tuesday-Thursday: Hunt, Analyse, Validate (3 Hours Total)
Break your hunting into one-hour sessions across three days. This prevents fatigue and lets you think between sessions.
Hour 1 (Tuesday): Gather data
Run your queries. Pull logs from relevant sources. Export results to a working spreadsheet or hunting platform.
Most hunts need data from multiple sources:
- Authentication logs (who logged in, from where, when)
- Network traffic (connections to unusual IPs or domains)
- File access logs (who touched what files)
- Process execution (what ran on endpoints)
Lean SOCs often lack perfect data coverage. Hunt with what you have. Finding one real threat with limited logs beats finding nothing with perfect visibility.
Hour 2 (Wednesday): Filter noise
Your initial query returned 10,000 results. Most are normal.
Filter aggressively:
- Remove known-good IPs, domains, and processes
- Focus on outliers (the one user who did something nobody else did)
- Prioritise high-privilege accounts and sensitive systems
- Look for timing anomalies (logins at 3 AM from accounts that never work nights)
Get your dataset down to 100-200 items worth human review.
Hour 3 (Thursday): Validate findings
Check each potential finding against the business context. That weird service account login at midnight? Scheduled backup job. The massive file access spike? New employee onboarding.
Real threats hide among false positives. Look for combinations that don't make sense:
- VPN login from Employee A's account in New York at 9 AM, then in Dubai at 9:15 AM
- The service account that normally runs batch jobs is now executing PowerShell scripts
- File server accessed by someone who doesn't work in that department
When something looks suspicious, escalate it. Even if 95% of your hunts find nothing, that 5% with real threats makes the routine worthwhile.
Friday Morning: Document Everything (30 Minutes)
Most threat hunting fails here. Teams hunt, find nothing, and move on. Six months later, someone hunts the same thing because nobody documented the first attempt.
Use a simple one-page template for every hunt:
Hunt Documentation Template:
- Hypothesis: What were you looking for?
- Data sources: Where did you pull logs from?
- Query/method: What searches did you run?
- Results: What did you find? (Include "nothing suspicious" if that's the answer)
- Follow-up: What should the next hunt investigate?
Store these in a shared drive or wiki. When new analysts join, they read past hunts to understand what normal looks like in your environment.
Documentation builds institutional knowledge. After 20 hunts, you have patterns. After 50, you have a playbook. After 100, new team members can onboard themselves by reading hunt logs.
One paragraph per hunt. Five minutes to write. Massive long-term value.
Making the Routine Stick in a Chaotic SOC
The biggest challenge isn't hunting—it's protecting those four hours from incidents, meetings, and "quick questions" that turn into hour-long rabbit holes.
Tactics that work:
Block the time on your calendar as "Threat Hunting - Do Not Schedule." Treat it like you'd treat a client meeting or regulatory deadline.
Rotate hunting duty among analysts. One person hunts each week while others cover alerts. Next week, swap. Everyone gets practice without drowning in dual responsibilities.
Start small. If four hours feels impossible, start with two. Thirty minutes is better than zero minutes. Build the habit first, expand the time later.
Automate the boring parts. Save your queries. Build scripts that pull the same logs every week. The faster you get through data gathering, the more time you have for actual analysis.
Expect resistance. When incidents spike, someone will suggest skipping hunting "just this week." Push back. The routine only works if it's routine—not something you do when convenient.
Hunting once a week catches threats that slip through alerts. Missing one week to fight fires is reasonable. Missing 12 weeks in a row means you're not hunting, you're pretending to hunt.
FAQs
Q. How do we find time to hunt when we can barely keep up with alerts?
A. You don't "find" time—you make it by treating hunting as mandatory maintenance. Block 4 hours on your calendar. If alerts are overwhelming, your problem isn't a lack of hunting time; it's too many alerts. Fix alert tuning first, then start hunting. Or rotate hunting duty so one analyst hunts while others cover alerts.
Q. What if we don't have threat intel feeds or fancy hunting tools?
A. Hunt with what you have. Basic SIEM queries, authentication logs, and network traffic data are enough to find real threats. The first 50 hunts should focus on understanding normal behaviour in your environment anyway. Expensive tools won't help if you don't know what normal looks like for your organisation.
Q. How do we know what to hunt for without dedicated threat hunters?
A. Follow the MITRE ATT&CK framework—pick one technique per week and hunt for evidence of it. Read threat intel reports and hunt for those TTPs in your logs. Review your "closed as benign" alerts for patterns. Ask your team what makes them suspicious but didn't quite trigger an alert. The backlog fills itself once you start paying attention.
Q. What counts as a "successful" hunt if we don't find threats?
A. Success is completing the hunt and documenting it. Finding nothing suspicious is a valid result—it means that the hypothesis doesn't apply to your environment, or attackers aren't using that technique against you. After 20 "nothing found" hunts, you've systematically ruled out 20 attack vectors. That's valuable defensive knowledge, not wasted effort.
Conclusion
Threat hunting in a lean SOC isn't about having more people or better tools. It's about carving out a small, consistent routine and protecting it from the chaos of daily operations.
Four hours a week. Simple hypotheses. Document everything. Rotate the duty.
That's the whole system. No magic, no massive budget, no dedicated headcount required.
Most SOCs never hunt because they're waiting for the "right" conditions—more staff, better tools, less incident volume. Those conditions never arrive. Meanwhile, attackers are already inside, moving slowly, staying quiet.
Start hunting this Monday. Pick one hypothesis. Spend four hours. Write one page of documentation.
Do it again next week. The threats you catch in month three will justify every hour you spent in months one and two.