Practical Threat Hunting in Microsoft 365

The Hunt Cycle

Every campaign module in this course follows the same six-step cycle — the structure that turns ad hoc querying into repeatable, documented hunting operations:

1. Hypothesize — formulate a specific, testable hypothesis about attacker behavior. Grounded in threat intelligence, ATT&CK coverage gaps, or prior incident findings.

2. Scope — define boundaries before querying. Which data sources, what time window, what population. Prevents drowning in noise or missing the threat through tunnel vision.

3. Collect — execute KQL queries in Advanced Hunting or Sentinel. Iterative — broad queries narrow based on findings.

4. Analyze — separate legitimate activity from suspicious activity using contextual enrichment. This is where hunting judgment lives — the query is mechanical, the analysis is skill.

5. Conclude — confirm or refute the hypothesis. Document findings regardless of outcome. Negative findings reduce organizational uncertainty.

6. Convert — turn validated hunt queries into scheduled detection rules. What you hunted today, you detect automatically tomorrow. Every hunt makes the SOC permanently smarter.

Who this course is for

SOC analysts moving from reactive to proactive. You triage alerts and investigate incidents. This course teaches you to find the compromises that never generated an alert — the ones that live in your logs right now, undetected.

Detection engineers building hunt capability. You write analytics rules. This course teaches the methodology that identifies which rules you need next — by hunting for the threats your current rules miss and converting findings into new detections.

IR practitioners extending proactively. You investigate after detection. This course teaches you to investigate before detection — to find the attacker during the dwell time window, before they achieve their objective.

Hunt team leads building programs. Phase 3 covers cadence, prioritization, documentation, leadership reporting, and automation — the operational material for building a sustainable hunting capability.

Not for beginners. This course assumes working KQL proficiency, familiarity with Defender XDR and Sentinel, and access to an M365 environment. If you need those foundations, start with Mastering KQL on this platform.

Campaigns, not concepts

Other courses teach you what threat hunting is. This course teaches you how to do it — ten complete hunt campaigns, each with hypotheses, scoped queries, analysis guidance, decision points, and detection rule outputs. You finish each module able to run that campaign in your environment tomorrow.

Hunt-to-detection pipeline

Every hunt campaign ends with detection conversion — the validated hunt query becomes a scheduled analytics rule. This is the mechanism that makes hunting self-funding: every successful hunt permanently reduces the detection gap. No other hunting course teaches this systematically.

Real findings, not lab flags

Every exercise runs against your own M365 environment. The OAuth application hunt discovers your actual unsanctioned apps. The authentication anomaly hunt identifies your actual suspicious sign-ins. The ransomware indicator hunt checks your actual endpoints. This course is simultaneously training and a security audit.

Program operations included

Phase 3 covers what no other hunting course addresses: how to build a hunt program your organization can sustain. Cadence, staffing, prioritization, leadership reporting, metrics, automation. The content that transforms individual hunting skill into organizational capability.

Practitioner-authored

Written by an active CSOC analyst who hunts in production Microsoft 365 environments. The queries work. The analysis guidance reflects what real M365 data actually looks like — including the false positives, the ambiguous results, and the judgment calls that synthetic labs never surface.

How it connects

Mastering KQL builds query proficiency. SOC Operations provides the detection engineering foundation. Practical Incident Response teaches investigation after detection. This course teaches the proactive complement — finding the compromises before any rule fires, then converting findings into permanent detection capability.