Hypotheses, telemetry, and human judgment: Inside Cisco Talos Threat Hunting

Cisco Talos describes its hypothesis-driven threat-hunting approach that combines AI at scale with human analyst judgment to surface stealthy adversary behavior across telemetry sources. The post gives examples of hunt types (suspicious Python/MSIEXEC User-Agents, DGA detection, connections to high-risk ASNs, behavioral outliers) and a case study where Talos discovered KongTuke C2 activity by correlating firewall outbound connections (TDS redirect to 144.31.221.82:6060) with EDR evidence (encoded PowerShell invoking Invoke-WebRequest to drop script.ps1, curl contacting C2, and anti-forensics Remove-Item), turning a single finding into a scoped intrusion with remediation guidance.