3 Ways to Utilize Process Behavior Data
Practical applications for security teams and detection engineers
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First - What is it?
If you are unfamiliar with process behavior data, check out our Insights data. By sifting through our database, you can quickly begin to understand what process behavior data looks like.
EchoTrail collects and analyzes behavioral data for hundreds of thousands of Windows processes. Our sensors monitor process executions and collect and analyze data such as:
Much of this data is made freely available via our website and our API. This data can be very useful for IT Security Analysts and Detection Engineers. Here are a few ways to utilize process behavior data.
1. Integrate with Your SOAR Platform
SOAR platforms are an excellent place to pull data in from multiple sources to enrich and automate actions on your security alerts. For security alerts that include a Windows process name you can easily enrich that alert to save an analyst time doing research.
Key Benefits:
- Automatic alert enrichment before analyst triage
- Dynamic alert scoring based on behavioral conformity
- Reduced analyst research time
- Correlation with process names, paths, hashes, etc.
Key Insight: EchoTrail is not opinionated about what behavior is good or bad, it simply captures what is. If the vast majority of Windows computers in the vast majority of environments execute processes in a similar fashion, then a departure from that norm might be concerning and worth elevating to an analyst for a closer look.
2. Threat Detection Research
There are a huge number of threat detection opportunities that can be borne out of scouring through EchoTrail data. As previously mentioned, EchoTrail is not typically trying to label a process as good or bad, but simply capturing how it behaves.
Behavioral Anomaly Detection
Look through our dataset to see how processes normally behave. Built-in Windows processes especially behave in very strict patterns.
Create detections that look for departures from normal behavior - especially effective against living-off-the-land attacks.
Real-time Scoring
Use your threat detection infrastructure to pull EchoTrail data as process executions are observed.
Compare observed executions against known behavior and calculate scores based on filename, hash, path, parent, children, etc.
Detection Strategy:
✅ Safe to Ignore:
Executables that behave normally according to historical patterns
🚨 Flag for Review:
Processes with significant behavioral departures (filename/hash mismatches, etc.)
3. Intel Reporting
For those that need to produce intel reports on recent attacker activity and exploits, EchoTrail can provide a nice resource to better understand the processes involved.
Key Questions EchoTrail Helps Answer:
Impact: Oftentimes when analysts are reporting out on a particular adversary campaign, many materials need to be gathered in order to effectively communicate what happened. When Windows processes are involved in the attack pattern, EchoTrail Insights can be a very useful tool to help readers understand how a given process fits into the bigger picture.
Answering common questions ahead of time helps the reader to better understand the bigger picture of an attack and how the victim's resources were used against them.
Getting Started
These are just a few of the ways that process behavior data can be useful to a security team. It's easy to get started by creating a free account and signing up for our free API tier.
Straightforward queries
Our API is designed to be simple and intuitive
Low barrier to entry
Get started quickly with minimal setup
Reach out with any questions and we're happy to help!
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Start exploring our free Insights data and see what process behavior intelligence can do for your security program.
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