What does a threat hunter do?
A threat hunter is a cybersecurity professional who proactively searches for cyber threats lurking undetected in networks. Unlike reactive security roles that respond to alerts, hunters form hypotheses about potential compromises and methodically investigate to uncover stealthy attacks.
Think of it this way: most security tools wait for something bad to happen and then alert you. Threat hunters assume attackers are already inside your network and go looking for them before they cause damage. This hypothesis-driven investigation is the core of what makes threat hunting different from traditional security work.
Your day as a hunter involves analyzing behavioral patterns, studying adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), and connecting dots across massive datasets. You're essentially a detective who understands both how attackers think and how your organization's systems work.
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Is threat hunting a good career?
Threat hunting offers strong career prospects with growing demandThreat hunting offers strong career prospects with growing demand at 17.0% CAGR as organizations recognize the limitations of purely reactive security. Hunters typically earn competitive salaries and work at the cutting edge of cybersecurity, directly impacting organizational resilience.competitive salaries averaging $162,500 and work at the cutting edge of cybersecurity, directly impacting organizational resilience.
The role challenges you constantly because attackers evolve their methods quickly. You'll need to keep learning, but that's what makes it rewarding for people passionate about cybersecurity. Many organizations also rely on managed threat hunting services, creating additional career opportunities within security vendors and consulting firms.
Salary and compensation: junior, mid, senior, and leadership
Compensation varies by market, clearance, industry, and cloud expertise. The bands below are directional U.S. ranges, normalized for base pay and typical total compensation (base + bonus/equity) as of 2025.
Junior/Associate Threat Hunter: $90,000–$120,000 base; ~$100,000–$135,000 total comp
Mid-level Threat Hunter: $120,000–$155,000 base; ~$135,000–$175,000 total comp
Senior Threat Hunter: $140,000–$170,000 base; ~$150,000–$190,000+ total comp
Hunt Team Lead / Manager: $160,000–$200,000 base; ~$180,000–$230,000+ total comp
Note: These figures are indicative, not guarantees. They reflect recent U.S. postings, recruiter input, and market scans, and are influenced by geography, cost of living, company stage, and pay philosophy. Validate with local data and current roles when negotiating. For additional context, review public benchmarks on ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor, and Salary.com.
Core responsibilities of a threat hunter
Your main responsibilities center on proactively identifying and neutralizing threats before they cause damage.
Develop and test hunt hypotheses: You create theories about potential compromises based on threat intelligence, behavioral anomalies, and attack path analysis, then investigate to prove or disprove them
Query and correlate telemetry: You dig through data from cloud resources, identity systems, workloads, and network infrastructure to connect disparate events into a coherent attack story
Document hunt playbooks and findings: Every hunt gets documented to create repeatable playbooks and share knowledge across the security organization for future reference
Partner with detection engineering teams: You transform your manual hunt discoveries into automated detection rules, continuously improving the organization's defenses
Day in the life: what to expect on the hunt
Your typical day starts by reviewing threat intelligence to understand new adversary TTPs. This information fuels the development of new hunt hypotheses testable ideas about how an attacker might be operating within your environment.
The bulk of your day involves querying massive datasets from endpoints, cloud resources, and network logs. You'll perform pivot analysis, following a trail of evidence from one data point to another to build a complete picture. When you find something, you document it meticulously and work with detection engineers to turn your manual discoveries into automated alerts.
Collaboration is constant. You'll work closely with SOC analysts, incident responders, and detection engineers to operationalize your discoveries and improve the organization's overall security posture.
Must-have skills for threat hunting
Success as a threat hunter requires a unique combination of deep technical knowledge and sharp investigative thinking. It's not just about knowing the tools – you need to think like an attacker.
Deep understanding of operating system internals: You need strong knowledge of Windows and Linux internals, including process creation, persistence mechanisms, and privilege escalation techniques
Proficiency in threat intelligence consumption: You must understand attacker TTPs and use frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to develop relevant hunt hypotheses
Strong query language skills: Proficiency in KQL, SQL, and Python for data analysis and automation is non-negotiable for analyzing large-scale security data
Cloud security expertise: Modern hunting happens in the cloud, so you need expertise in IaaS/PaaS architectures, Kubernetes, serverless functions, IAM models, and eBPF telemetry collection
How to become a threat hunter
Most people transition into threat hunting after building foundational security experience. Common entry paths include SOC analyst, incident responder, detection engineer, or red team operator roles.
Your first six months should focus on building OS and networking foundations, learning SIEM platforms, and practicing with publicly available datasets. From six to twelve months, publish hunt notebooks on GitHub, contribute detection rules to open-source projects, and complete virtual labs.
If you're breaking in without experience, set up home labs and leverage cloud provider free tiers to build and attack your own environments. Analyze open-source telemetry datasets to simulate real-world hunting scenarios.
Certifications and training that help (not required)
Certifications provide structured learning but aren't strictly required for landing a threat hunting job. Hands-on experience matters more.
SANS certifications like GCTI, GCIH, and GCFA offer deep, practical training and are highly respected. CompTIA CySA+ covers analytical skills and threat hunting fundamentals at an entry level. Cloud provider certifications from AWS, Azure, and GCP demonstrate platform-specific security knowledge.
Free resources include MITRE ATT&CK training, detection engineering workshops, and community-driven capture-the-flag events. These provide valuable learning without the cost of formal certifications.
Threat hunting methodologies to learn
Threat hunters use several established methodologies to structure their investigations. Understanding these approaches helps you apply the right strategy for different scenarios.
Intel-led hunting starts with threat intelligence indicators and searches for evidence of specific threat actors or campaigns. You begin with known bad indicators and look for matches in your environment. This method works well when you have solid intelligence about active threats targeting your industry.
Behavior-led hunting focuses on abnormal patterns and outlier activities that deviate from baseline behavior. You need deep knowledge of what's normal in your environment to spot deviations that could indicate a threat. This approach catches novel attacks that don't match known indicators.
Anomaly-led hunting leverages statistical analysis to identify unusual events worth investigating. It's effective at finding new threats but requires careful tuning to avoid overwhelming noise. Threat-informed defense uses frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to systematically hunt for technique implementations, ensuring comprehensive coverage against known attack methods.
Tools and technologies aspiring hunters should be familiar with
Your toolkit should cover the common categories of signal collection, large-scale search, deep investigation, and operationalization. Focus on what each tool type tells you and how to pivot between them to build and prove hypotheses.
Telemetry collection and normalization: Aggregate high-fidelity signals from endpoints, cloud control planes, identity providers, networks, and SaaS. Normalize schemas, enrich with asset/owner context, and retain enough history to see dwell time.
Aggregation, search, and correlation (SIEM/data lake): Query at scale with KQL/SQL/regex, join disparate datasets, and build saved searches/dashboards to test hypotheses and measure coverage.
Endpoint and workload visibility (EDR/XDR): Process, file, registry, and network telemetry with remote response (isolate, collect, remediate) for rapid scoping and containment.
Cloud-native control plane analytics: API-driven visibility into resources, configuration drift, activity logs, and Kubernetes signals to track ephemeral assets and identity-to-resource relationships.
Identity, auth, and access analytics: Sign-in, token, and session data; privilege use; consent grants; conditional access and MFA patterns to uncover account takeover and role abuse.
Network detection and traffic analysis: IDS/NSM, DNS and flow telemetry, proxy logs, and targeted packet capture to validate C2, exfiltration, and lateral movement—even when traffic is encrypted.
Forensics and malware analysis: Host acquisition (disk/memory), timeline reconstruction, binary triage, sandbox detonation, and YARA scanning to get ground truth.
Threat intelligence and enrichment: Ingest IOCs, TTPs, and actor profiles; map to ATT&CK; score and enrich events to add context without becoming IOC-only.
Graph, timeline, and visualization: Relationship graphs, attack paths, and time-ordered narratives to see connections, explain impact, and guide detection engineering.
Automation and orchestration: SOAR/playbooks, scheduled queries, and notebooks to codify hunts, reduce toil, and make successful pivots repeatable.
Case management and collaboration: Track hypotheses, evidence, decisions, and outcomes with standardized hunt notebooks and templates for auditability.
Adversary emulation and lab tooling: Atomic tests, purple-team frameworks, and cloud/IaC labs to validate hypotheses, sharpen detections, and build muscle memory.
Exposure and attack path analysis: Identify toxic combinations of misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and privileges to prioritize high-value hunting missions.
Deception and canary controls: Honeytokens, canary credentials, and trap services that create high-signal alerts and reliable hunt starting points.
You don’t need every product in each category – you need to understand the signal each provides and how to stitch them together into a defensible hunt.
How to practice: pick one use case (for example, suspicious OAuth consent or rare process injection), enumerate required data sources, write queries in your SIEM/EDR, validate with lab emulation, then document the hunt and automate the best pivots.
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Portfolio, labs, and projects to showcase
A strong portfolio demonstrating practical skills often impresses employers more than certifications. It shows you can apply concepts to solve real-world problems.
Publish detailed hunt hypotheses with supporting queries, analysis methodology, and findings documentation. Build and share detection rules derived from hunting activities, mapped to MITRE ATT&CK techniques. Create cloud-focused hunting scenarios demonstrating understanding of IAM abuse, container escapes, and lateral movement.
Document investigation timelines showing how you pivoted through data to uncover attack chains. These artifacts prove you can do the work, not just talk about it.
In-house vs. managed threat hunting roles
In-house hunters develop deep organizational knowledge and work closely with internal teams. You gain intimate understanding of your environment and can drive long-term security improvements. However, you may have a narrower view of threats and potentially limited tooling budgets.
Managed service hunters gain exposure to diverse environments and attack patterns. You see a high volume of threats across different industries and technologies. The downside is less deep context about specific client businesses and limited involvement in long-term remediation strategies.
Why Wiz is built for cloud threat hunters
Cloud threats are identity- and configuration-driven, and they move through ephemeral workloads. Wiz Defend brings that reality into one view across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes so you can go from hypothesis to proof fast. The Wiz Security Graph gives the context hunters need – pivoting from a suspicious principal to its effective permissions, reachable resources, and runtime behaviors to scope blast radius with evidence.
Investigations stay live. Defend streams detections and assembles timelines automatically, while the lightweight eBPF Runtime Sensor adds process-level telemetry to confirm or dismiss suspected TTPs in containers and serverless. You spend less time stitching tools and more time validating the story.
Defend also keeps you focused and operational. Attack Path Analysis highlights the most likely adversary routes so hunts start where risk is highest, Mika AI accelerates pivots with natural-language exploration, and cloud-to-code traceability turns one-off findings into durable detections and engineering fixes.
Schedule a Wiz Defend defend demo to watch how real-world attack hypotheses are automatically tested, validated, and surfaced with full context so your team can act on proof, not assumptions.