Threat Hunting: What It Is, How It Works, & Why It Matters
Huntress, Monday, November 2nd, 2026
Huntress explains what cyber threat hunting is, how hypothesis-driven hunts work and how hunting relates to threat intelligence and detection.
Huntress defines threat hunting as a proactive search across networks and endpoints for malicious activity that traditional defenses missed, starting from a question rather than an alert.
It notes that damaging attacks often use stolen credentials and built-in Windows tools, while 57% of IT professionals in its 2025 survey were very confident they could catch signature-less attacks.
A hunter builds a hypothesis, searches telemetry for evidence and turns findings into detections so future attempts are caught automatically.
The post contrasts threat hunting with threat intelligence and detection, explaining how they feed each other, and describes structured hunting based on defined hypotheses and procedures.