Behavioral Threat Hunting
Giving security teams the tools to proactively search historical and live email data for threats that evaded initial detection.
The challenge
No detection engine catches everything at the point of delivery, and attackers continually adjust techniques to slip past existing controls, meaning some malicious emails inevitably land in inboxes undetected. Without a way to retroactively search across historical mail flow using flexible, behaviour-based queries, security teams have no practical way to find these missed threats until a user reports harm.
Effective threat hunting in email requires both a rich, queryable dataset of message and sender behaviour, and a detection language expressive enough to describe the subtle patterns of an emerging campaign, rather than relying purely on known indicators of compromise.
Key solutions
Historical message querying
Analysts can search across historical email data using behavioural and content-based criteria to find messages that match an emerging or evolving attack pattern.
Custom detection language
A purpose-built query language lets threat hunters express nuanced behavioural patterns, rather than being limited to indicator-of-compromise lookups.
Retroactive remediation
Once a missed threat is confirmed through hunting, matching messages can be identified and remediated across the organisation in bulk.
Threat intelligence integration
Hunting queries can incorporate external threat intelligence indicators alongside Sublime's own behavioural signals for broader campaign detection.
Core capabilities
Message search platform
Queryable historical store of email metadata and content signals.
Custom query language
Purpose-built syntax for behavioural and content-based hunting.
Bulk remediation tooling
Act on hunting results across the whole mail environment.
Shared community detections
Access to detection logic contributed by the wider Sublime community.
Uncovering a missed credential phishing campaign
News breaks of a new credential phishing technique abusing a legitimate file-sharing service to host fake login pages, a technique that predates most vendors' signature updates. A threat hunter uses Sublime's query language to search historical mail flow for the specific structural pattern the campaign relies on, rather than waiting for an indicator-of-compromise feed to catch up. The search surfaces a handful of matching messages that had been delivered days earlier and gone unreported. The hunter confirms the pattern, remediates the matching messages across affected mailboxes, and turns the query into a standing detection to catch any recurrence automatically.
- 1A new phishing technique is reported publicly, ahead of signature coverage.
- 2A threat hunter queries historical mail flow for the specific behavioural pattern.
- 3Matching messages are remediated and the query becomes a standing detection.
Expected outcomes
- Ability to retroactively find threats that evaded initial detection
- Faster response to newly disclosed attack techniques
- A growing library of tuned, organisation-specific detections
- Reduced dwell time for missed threats already sitting in inboxes
How CyberLane helps
CyberLane assesses whether an organisation's security team has the capacity and need for proactive email threat hunting, and independently advises on how a platform like Sublime's hunting capability should be resourced and operationalised.
- Threat hunting capability and maturity assessment
- Workflow design for retroactive email threat hunting
- Independent evaluation of hunting tooling options
- Handover plan for embedding hunting into ongoing SOC operations
CyberLane is independent and works on the decision rather than the deployment. Product-specific delivery is coordinated with the vendor or a qualified implementation partner.
Official vendor sources
Capability descriptions are based on the vendor's published materials; CyberLane's wording is independently written.
Evaluating Sublime Security for Behavioral Threat Hunting?
We start with an independent conversation about where your exposure actually sits, before any technology decision is made.