Final answer:
To proactively discover and respond to emerging threats, forming and deploying a hunt team, along with instituting heuristic anomaly detection, are the best methodologies. Hunt teams proactively search for hidden threats while heuristic anomaly detection offers behavior-based monitoring, making them very effective in early threat discovery.
Step-by-step explanation:
To increase the likelihood of discovering and responding to emerging threats earlier in the life cycle, the company can consider the following methodologies. Installing and configuring an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) can help to actively prevent and block network attacks in real-time. Enforcing routine Group Policy Object (GPO) reviews can ensure that security configurations are up to date and consistent across the network.
However, forming and deploying a hunt team would be the best method to proactively search for and identify threats that have evaded existing security measures. Instituting heuristic anomaly detection can provide behavior-based analysis to detect unusual patterns that may indicate a threat. The use of a protocol analyzer with appropriate connectors can be helpful in network traffic analysis, but it might not be as proactive as a hunt team in discovering threats.
Considering the company's objective, forming and deploying a hunt team combined with heuristic anomaly detection are the most effective methods for proactive threat identification. Hunt teams bring the human element into security operations, allowing experts to use their intuition and experience to find hidden threats.
Heuristic anomaly detection complements this by providing automated, behavior-based monitoring that can flag unusual activity for further investigation by the hunt team.
Therefore, D. Institute heuristic anomaly detection is correct.