What's That Term: Threat Hunting for Law Firms and Financial Advisors
Written By: Luke Ross
Most security tools are built to wait. A firewall waits for suspicious traffic, antivirus waits for a known piece of malware, and an alert system waits for something to trip a rule. That approach catches a lot, but it has a blind spot: the attacker who is patient, quiet, and careful enough not to trip anything. For a law firm holding privileged case files or a financial advisory practice managing client portfolios, that quiet attacker is the one who does the most damage.
This is where threat hunting comes in. In this installment of our "What's That Term" series, published during National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (a great time to check whether your operation is ready), we explain what threat hunting means, how it differs from traditional monitoring, what a hunt actually looks like, and how smaller professional services firms can put it to work without building a full security operations center of their own.
What Is Threat Hunting?
Threat hunting is the practice of proactively searching through your networks, endpoints, and cloud accounts for signs of malicious activity that your automated defenses have not flagged. Instead of waiting for an alarm, a threat hunter starts with the assumption that something may already be wrong and goes looking for evidence.
The key word is proactive. Traditional security monitoring is reactive by design: it responds to alerts. Threat hunting flips that model around. A hunter forms a hypothesis ("What if an attacker is using a stolen partner login to access our document system after hours?"), then digs through logs, sign-in records, and system behavior to prove or disprove it. Even when a hunt finds nothing, it produces something valuable: a clearer picture of what normal looks like in your environment and new detection rules that make your automated tools smarter.
Threat Hunting vs. Threat Intelligence
These two terms often appear together, and they work best as partners. Threat intelligence is information about who is attacking, what tactics they use, and which industries they target. Threat hunting is the act of using that knowledge to search your own systems. If you want a deeper look at the intelligence side, our guide on the importance of cyber threat intelligence explains how that information is gathered and applied.
Why Law Firms and Financial Advisors Are Prime Targets
Professional services firms sit on exactly the kind of information attackers want. Law firms hold merger details, litigation strategy, intellectual property, and personal information about clients. Financial advisors hold account numbers, tax records, net worth details, and the authority to move money. That combination makes these firms attractive to ransomware groups, business email compromise schemes, and even attackers seeking insider information for trading.
Smaller firms face a particular challenge. They often have the same sensitive data as large firms but far fewer dedicated security staff. Attackers know this, and they frequently target small and mid-sized practices as an easier path to valuable information. Clients, insurers, and regulators also increasingly expect firms to show they are actively protecting data, not simply hoping their tools catch everything. Our overview of IT support services for legal firms covers many of the day-to-day technology pressures that make this harder.
The Problem of Dwell Time
"Dwell time" is the period between when an attacker first gets in and when they are discovered. The longer that window, the more time an intruder has to explore file shares, read email, and quietly copy data. Skilled attackers deliberately use legitimate tools and valid credentials so their activity blends in with normal work. Threat hunting exists largely to shrink that window by finding intruders who have slipped past the alarms.
How a Threat Hunt Works, Step by Step
A threat hunt is not a random search through logs. Good hunts follow a repeatable process that turns a question into evidence and evidence into better defenses. Here is how a typical hunt unfolds for a professional services firm.
1. Form a Hypothesis
Every hunt begins with a specific, testable question. For a law firm, that might be "Is anyone forwarding client email to an outside address?" For a financial advisor, it might be "Are there sign-ins to our portfolio platform from unusual locations or at unusual hours?" Hypotheses often come from threat intelligence, recent industry incidents, or changes in your own environment, such as a new remote access tool.
A good hypothesis narrows the search so the hunter knows which data to examine. Vague questions produce vague answers, while focused ones produce clear findings.
2. Gather the Right Data
Next, the hunter collects the data needed to test the hypothesis. Common sources include email and mailbox audit logs, identity and sign-in records, endpoint activity from detection and response tools, firewall and VPN logs, and access records from document management systems.
This step often reveals gaps. If your firm is not retaining sign-in logs long enough, or your endpoints are not reporting activity centrally, the hunt itself becomes a useful audit of your visibility.
3. Investigate and Analyze
With data in hand, the hunter looks for patterns that do not fit. That could be a user account logging in from two countries within an hour, a workstation running administrative commands at 2 a.m., or a sudden spike in files downloaded from a matter folder. Investigators compare activity against a baseline of normal behavior to separate true red flags from harmless oddities.
4. Respond and Contain
If the hunt uncovers malicious activity, the process shifts into incident response. That can mean disabling compromised accounts, isolating affected devices, resetting credentials, and preserving evidence. For firms with confidentiality or notification obligations, this is also the point to involve leadership, legal counsel, and your cyber insurance carrier according to your response plan.
5. Improve Your Defenses
Finally, every hunt should leave your environment stronger. Findings become new automated detection rules, configuration changes, or training topics. A hunt that confirms nothing is wrong still documents what normal looks like and closes visibility gaps, which makes the next hunt faster and more accurate.
Repeating this cycle regularly turns threat hunting from a one-time project into an ongoing discipline that matures along with your firm.
What Threat Hunters Look For
Hunters rely on a mix of clues, some obvious and some subtle. Understanding the categories helps partners and practice leaders appreciate why certain logs and tools matter.
Indicators of compromise (IOCs): Known malicious file signatures, IP addresses, or domains linked to attacker infrastructure.
Unusual sign-in behavior: Impossible travel, logins at odd hours, or repeated failed attempts followed by a success.
Suspicious mailbox rules: Hidden rules that forward, delete, or redirect messages, a common trick in wire fraud schemes.
Living-off-the-land activity: Attackers using built-in tools like PowerShell or remote desktop to avoid detection.
Lateral movement: One account or device suddenly accessing systems it has never touched before.
Data staging and exfiltration: Large archives created in unusual locations or unexpected uploads to personal cloud storage.
Many of these signals are easier to spot when your network is thoughtfully divided. Our explainer on network segmentation for professional services shows how limiting which systems can talk to each other makes lateral movement both harder for attackers and more visible to hunters.
Building a Threat Hunting Program Without a Full Security Team
Few small or mid-sized law firms and advisory practices can justify hiring dedicated threat hunters. The good news is that effective hunting is less about headcount and more about having the right foundation, clear priorities, and access to expertise when you need it.
Start With Visibility
You cannot hunt in data you do not collect. Modern endpoint detection and response tools, centralized logging, and properly configured audit settings in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace form the base. Continuous oversight matters too; the benefits of proactive IT monitoring extend directly into hunting, because the same data that powers monitoring also fuels investigations.
Tighten Identity and Access
Because so many attacks rely on stolen credentials, strong identity controls make hunting simpler and more effective. Multi-factor authentication, least-privilege access, and conditional access policies reduce the noise hunters must sift through. A zero trust architecture takes this further by verifying every request rather than trusting anything inside the network by default.
Protect the Crown Jewels First
Focus hunting efforts where the stakes are highest: client files, trust accounts, portfolio platforms, and email. Knowing exactly where sensitive documents live, and who can reach them, gives hunters a head start. Our article on document management strategies for accounting and legal firms offers practical ways to organize and secure those repositories.
Partner for Expertise
For most firms, the most practical path is working with a managed IT and security provider that combines monitoring tools with experienced analysts. A partner can run scheduled hunts, respond to findings, and translate results into plain-language recommendations for firm leadership. Pairing that with periodic reviews, like the process described in how to conduct an effective cybersecurity audit, gives you both ongoing vigilance and a regular big-picture assessment.
Conclusion
Threat hunting is the practice of assuming an attacker could already be present and going out to find them before they cause harm. For law firms and financial advisors, whose value rests on client trust and confidentiality, that proactive mindset is quickly becoming a core part of responsible data stewardship. The process is straightforward in concept: form a hypothesis, gather data, investigate, respond, and improve. What makes it work is solid visibility, strong identity controls, and people who know what to look for.
You do not need an in-house security operations center to benefit. Kotman Technology helps professional services firms build the monitoring foundation, access controls, and expert support that make threat hunting practical and effective. This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, reach out to our team to talk about how proactive threat hunting can help protect your clients, your reputation, and your firm's future.
Kotman Technology has been delivering comprehensive technology solutions to clients in California and Michigan for nearly two decades. We pride ourselves on being the last technology partner you'll ever need. Contact us today to experience the Kotman Difference.