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Interview question · Detection Engineering & Incident Response

What is threat hunting, how do you run a hunt, and how do you know it was worth the time?

A hunt is a testable hypothesis about an attacker your detections missed. Without one, it is just browsing logs. The output that justifies it is usually a new detection, not a captured attacker.

mediumNewPreparation tags: CrowdStrike, Google, MicrosoftUpdated Nov 2026

A hunt is a testable hypothesis about an attacker your detections missed. Without one, it is just browsing logs. The output that justifies it is usually a new detection, not a captured attacker.

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What would you say before reading the answer?

  1. 01 State the assumptions your answer depends on.
  2. 02 Explain the mechanism and choose a control.
  3. 03 Name a condition that would change your decision.

The worked answer includes an approach, scoring criteria and follow-up questions. Compare the reasoning with your own.

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What if · the follow-ups in this answer

The answer works through 6 follow-ups like an interviewer would

A security team wants to start threat hunting but has no dedicated hunters and limited time.

  1. What is threat hunting?
  2. Where do good hypotheses come from?
  3. How do you run a hunt?
  4. What if the hunt finds nothing?
  5. How do you measure the programme?
  6. How would you start the programme?

Each rung has a nudge, a model answer, the principle that carries over and the weak answer to avoid. Premium opens every answer and ladder.

UP NEXT ON YOUR JOURNEY
Next in this trackHow do you triage a suspicious file safely, and how would you write a YARA rule that catches its family without false positives?Next in this trackDesign a security telemetry pipeline for millions of events per second that supports detection and survives an attacker.Next in this trackPractical coding: find the top source IPs in an auth log, then do it again for an unbounded stream with fixed memory.
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