Here’s the part nobody likes to admit in steering committee meetings: most organizations didn’t fail at security because they lacked visibility. They failed because they didn’t know what to do with the visibility they already had.
A SIEM goes live with a lot of optimism. Streamlined logs and dashboards make the compliance teams happy. But a few months in, reality sets in. The SOC is buried in alerts that stack up faster than anyone can clear them. Analysts start ignoring entire alert categories just to stay sane.
And when a real incident finally breaks through—usually after an external notification, the same question comes up every time:
“How did we miss this?”
The uncomfortable answer is usually this: nothing was technically “missed.” It was all there. It just didn’t stand out.
Log Collection Was Never Supposed to Be the End Goal
Centralized logging is important for forensics, compliance, incident reconstruction, and understanding the baseline behavior. But that alone should not be the measure of SIEM success.
What differentiates mature security programs is that they’ve stopped waiting for alerts and started hunting for threats.
Threat hunting flips the script. Instead of letting correlation rules tell you what’s suspicious, you start with hypotheses about how attackers might compromise your environment. Then you use your SIEM data to prove or disprove those theories.
Real examples:
- “If ransomware operators gained access, what would their lateral movement pattern look like in our network architecture?”
- “How would credential abuse from a compromised executive account actually appear?”
- “What does data staging before exfiltration look like in our environment specifically?”
Your out-of-the-box correlation rules can’t answer these questions. They require understanding your business context, your critical assets, attacker tradecraft—then proactively searching for those patterns.
Alert-driven SOCs are constantly reacting, triaging, and firefighting. Hunting-driven SOCs are finding threats before they become incidents.
Common Mistakes That Keep Organizations Stuck
Most of the organizations do not fully utilize their SIEM.
- Treating SIEM as a compliance checkbox: If your primary SIEM use case is generating reports for auditors, you don’t have a detection platform; you have an audit tool.
- Relying exclusively on vendor-provided detection rules: Those out-of-the-box rules are generic by design. They don’t understand your business, your critical assets, your unique environment. They’re for you to get started and build on it for your business.
- Ingesting everything without prioritization: Just ingesting all the data does not mean you are secure. You need to effectively prioritize the data and investigate it.
- Failing to align with SOC workflows: Your SIEM should support your analysts and not slow them down. If your team spends more time managing the alerts and the solution instead of hunting threats, then something is wrong.
The good thing is that you need not replace your SIEM; you just need to rethink how you use it.
Tips to Get Started:
You don’t need to revolutionize your entire SOC overnight. Most organizations ease into threat hunting by:
- Prioritization: Start with high-impact threat scenarios such as ransomware and credential abuse. Don’t try to hunt for everything at once. Focus on the attacks that would devastate your specific business.
- Incremental Hunting: Use guided hunting queries and structured investigations to build workflows for your organization. Embed small hunting tasks into existing SOC operations. Allow your analysts to dedicate a few hours per week to proactively search for specific threat patterns.
- Measure the Outcomes: Check if detection time was reduced and if your team found threats that the alerts missed.
Over time, threat hunting becomes part of how your entire SOC operates.
What Your SIEM Actually Needs to Support Hunting
Not all SIEM platforms can do this effectively. If yours was built primarily for compliance and log aggregation, it is going to be difficult. Real threat hunting requires:
- Unified visibility: An attack might start with network recon, move to endpoint compromise, escalate through cloud services, and exfiltrate via legitimate file transfer. If your SIEM only sees logs, without context, then you may lose the plot.
- Rich telemetry and behavioral context: You need user behavior, process relationships, network flows, and historical patterns. When someone accesses a sensitive file, you need to know: Is this their first time? Do they normally work these hours? Is this system even related to their job function?
- Fast, flexible querying across historical data: Most attacks only make sense in hindsight. You need to pivot quickly across weeks or months of data, correlating today’s suspicious activity with seemingly innocuous events from last Tuesday.
Looking Forward: SIEM as the SOC Backbone
As environments grow more complex—hybrid cloud, remote work, IoT, OT all generating security telemetry, SIEM is evolving from a detection tool into the central nervous system of security operations.
The platforms winning in this space aren’t the ones with the slickest dashboards or the most AI buzzwords in their marketing. They’re the ones that make it genuinely easier for analysts to understand what’s happening and respond effectively.
The future of SIEM isn’t about collecting more logs or generating more alerts. It’s about transforming raw visibility into actual understanding of adversary behavior across your entire environment.
Why NetWitness?
NetWitnes SIEM has been architected for investigative workflows. It combines logs with full pack capture, endpoint telemetry, and user behavior analytics in a unified platform. It extracts threat-relevant metadata from over 200 fields and enriches it with threat intelligence, business context, and behavioral analytics during capture time. The analyst workbench capabilities are also designed specifically for threat hunting. It can reconstruct entire attack chains visually, replay suspicious sessions (web, FTP, email), and pivot across different data types seamlessly.
