A hunt for new forwarding rules on city finance mailboxes returns no matches this week. What should the analyst do with that outcome?

Hypothesis hunting includes documenting refuted or negative results, not only confirmed hits. When a hunt for new forwarding rules on city finance mailboxes returns no matches this week, the analyst should document the hunt as a negative result so the clean finding is recorded for coverage, timing, and later detection decisions rather than treated as a personal or process failure. Silently rerunning the same hunt every hour forever without recording a result leaves no audit trail and no learning about seasonality or coverage gaps. Marking a correlation search as a true-positive notable anyway fabricates Incident Review outcomes and corrupts metrics. Deleting the Email data model because it produced no hits destroys shared CIM capability because of one quiet week. Exam caveat: a documented negative is a valid hunt outcome on SPLK-5001—absence of evidence for that hypothesis in that window is information, not a reason to invent notables or remove data models. Operational check: write the finance forwarding-rule hunt result as negative with time range, data sources searched, and SPL used; store it where the SOC can reuse it; and only then decide whether to schedule a lighter continuous detection or keep periodic hunts.