Security operations teams face a persistent challenge: the tools are in place, the alerts are flowing, but the expertise and bandwidth to act on what the data reveals often isn't.
HuntIQ is Tanium's response to that gap: a three-part advanced support option that combines Guardian advanced research dashboards, Tanium Security Operations capabilities, and experienced hands-on threat hunters embedded directly in customer environments for 12 months.
Tanium Director for Threat Hunting Michael Bailey brings more than 20 years of experience (including national-level malware and packet analysis for the Department of Defense) to lead this initiative and define what proactive threat hunting looks like inside enterprise environments at scale.
In this episode, Michael walks through what HuntIQ is, how its three components work together, and what the engagement model looks like in practice. He explains how threat hunters develop hypotheses using data-driven, intelligence-driven, entity-driven, and TTP-based approaches, and why the 12-month engagement model is central to delivering value that many short-term security engagements may not provide. He also addresses a question many security practitioners have when they first hear about HuntIQ: will this team replace my existing staff?
Michael also demonstrates how Tanium's real-time data collection capabilities and Jupyter Notebook-based hunter tools support the full threat hunting workflow, from hypothesis to analysis to repeatable, documented detection.
If your security team is struggling to get the most out of your Tanium investment or address gaps in visibility across your environment, this episode is essential viewing. Watch the full episode below.
Key takeaways
- HuntIQ's three components: HuntIQ consists of the Guardian advanced research team (which produces Guardian dashboards giving C-staff and security teams relevant information about their estate), the Tanium security operations product (Direct Response, the IR product, which is evolving into Security Operations), and experienced hands-on threat hunters embedded in customer environments for 12 months.
- The 12-month engagement model: Unlike short-term scan-and-report engagements, HuntIQ hunters spend 12 months learning a customer's business use cases, pain points, and capabilities, with customers often citing enablement as a key source of value from the service.
“One of the things I dislike about the security industry is this like, "Hey, pay me. I'm gonna come in, I'm gonna just run a bunch of scans and drop you a product and then walk away, right?"Very short-term engagement, what we do is vastly different.”Tanium Director for Threat Hunting Michael Bailey
- Real customer wins from Private Preview: Early customer deployments showed HuntIQ’s ability to surface malicious driver activity—including crypto mining—in environments where traditional security tooling had blind spots.
“We did 46,000 drivers across this one customer and we found 16 potentially malicious drivers. Some of this was specifically crypto mining that was being done inside of their environment.”Tanium Director for Threat Hunting Michael Bailey
- Enabling teams, not replacing them: HuntIQ hunters work directly with existing security staff, teaching them how to use Tanium's API and advanced tooling and giving customers the hunter tools the team develops, so the value of the engagement extends well beyond individual hunts.
“We're not there to take their jobs. We're there to enable them as part of their team.”Tanium Director for Threat Hunting Michael Bailey
- Threat hunting hypothesis categories: Hunts are built from data-driven observations, intelligence feeds, entity-driven knowledge of what's most important to the organization, TTPs from Advanced Persistent Threats, or hybrid combinations of all of these, with entity-driven hunts highlighted as a key differentiator because they require deep familiarity with the customer's environment.
- Tanium as a central source of visibility: Tanium can help organizations investigate gaps in endpoint visibility across their security stack, validating data, answering questions raised by other tools, and in some cases collecting data that may not have been surfaced elsewhere, including one 2023 customer example involving a malicious shortcut that had not been identified by existing controls.
- Jupyter Notebooks as hunter tools: The HuntIQ team uses Jupyter Notebooks and Python for data analysis, creating repeatable and documented hunts that can be handed directly to customers and fed back into Tanium engineering for potential inclusion in the product itself.
Additional resources
- Tanium Threat Response endpoint detection and response capabilities: Explore the Tanium product at the core of the HuntIQ security operations component, including how it supports detection, investigation, and response across your endpoint estate.
- How Tanium HuntIQ delivers expert-led threat hunting for enterprise security teams: A closer look at HuntIQ and how Tanium's expert hunters partner with security teams to proactively uncover advanced threats and strengthen security operations.
- Tanium Threat Response 4.12 user guide for incident detection, investigation, and response: Technical documentation covering how to configure and use Tanium Threat Response for alert management, detection, and endpoint investigation.