Terminology Index

Glossary

1801 terms

Open concept maps

Showing 1537-1568 of 1801 terms

S
32

Stack Counting

A hunting and analytics technique that counts how often each value of a field occurs to surface rare items, on the premise that unusual values often indicate threats worth investigating.

Stack counting (a.k.a. stack analysis or simply 'stacking') tabulates how many times each distinct value of a field appears, exposing rare or outlier values in a sea of common ones, a process running on only one host, a path seen almost nowhere else, an unusual hash. As a logging-and-hunting technique, stack counting is one of the most productive moves a hunter makes against rich telemetry. It pairs with frequency analysis, outlier detection, and long-tail analysis in the hunter's data-driven toolkit.

Introduced in: Threat Hunting Fundamentals, Logging, Monitoring, and Telemetry

Examples

  • Stack-counting parent processes to find rare lineage on one host.
  • Counting paths across endpoints to surface unusual binaries.
  • Using stacking to expose long-tail outliers worth investigating.

No related terms linked yet.