Stopping an incident isn’t enough—you have to understand how it happened and whether something deeper is still lurking. This episode explores root cause analysis and threat hunting as advanced investigative tools that move teams from reaction to prevention. Root cause analysis aims to determine the exact failure—whether it’s a missed patch, user error, misconfiguration, or policy gap—that allowed an incident to occur. Threat hunting, on the other hand, proactively searches for signs of attacker presence that may have escaped detection, using behavioral analytics, threat intelligence, and hypothesis-driven investigations. These disciplines require technical skill, curiosity, and a strong understanding of the environment. When used together, they eliminate blind spots, surface hidden threats, and help close vulnerabilities before the next attack happens.