hunting-for-spearphishing-indicators

name	hunting-for-spearphishing-indicators
description	Hunt for spearphishing campaign indicators across email logs, endpoint telemetry, and network data to detect targeted email attacks. Use when hunting for spearphishing campaign indicators across email logs, endpoint telemetry,.
domain	cybersecurity
tags	["threat-hunting","mitre-attack","spearphishing","initial-access","email-security","t1566","proactive-detection"]
subdomain	threat-hunting
version	1.0
author	oyi77
license	Apache-2.0
d3fend_techniques	["File Metadata Consistency Validation","Application Protocol Command Analysis","Identifier Analysis","Content Format Conversion","Message Analysis"]
nist_csf	["DE.CM-01","DE.AE-02","DE.AE-07","ID.RA-05"]

Hunting For Spearphishing Indicators

Overview

Cybersecurity skill for hunting for spearphishing indicators. Follows industry best practices and security standards.

When to Use

Trigger phrases:

• "hunting for spearphishing indicators"

• "When proactively hunting for indicators of hunting for spearphishing indicators"

• "After threat intelligence indicates active campaigns using these techniques"

• "During incident response to scope compromise related to these techniques"

• When proactively hunting for indicators of hunting for spearphishing indicators in the environment

• After threat intelligence indicates active campaigns using these techniques

• During incident response to scope compromise related to these techniques

• When EDR or SIEM alerts trigger on related indicators

• During periodic security assessments and purple team exercises

When NOT to Use

• When you lack proper authorization for testing
• For production systems without change management
• When the task requires legal or compliance expertise beyond technical scope

Prerequisites

• EDR platform with process and network telemetry (CrowdStrike, MDE, SentinelOne)
• SIEM with relevant log data ingested (Splunk, Elastic, Sentinel)
• Sysmon deployed with comprehensive configuration
• Windows Security Event Log forwarding enabled
• Threat intelligence feeds for IOC correlation

Workflow

# Example: IOC detection
import re

IOC_PATTERNS = {
    "ip": r"\b(?:\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}\b",
    "domain": r"\b[a-z0-9-]+\.[a-z]{2,}\b",
    "hash_md5": r"\b[a-f0-9]{32}\b",
    "hash_sha256": r"\b[a-f0-9]{64}\b",
}

def extract_iocs(text: str) -> dict:
    return {k: re.findall(v, text)  k, v  IOC_PATTERNS.items()}