Secskills Defense

Run hypothesis-driven threat hunts across endpoint, network, cloud, and identity telemetry using stack counting, outlier analysis, and ATT&CK-based hypotheses, with SIEM query patterns for Splunk, KQL, and Elastic. Use when proactively searching for undetected compromise, validating an intel report against your environment, or converting a hunch into a repeatable hunt.

Analyze suspected malware safely — containment, static triage, sandboxed detonation, unpacking, capability and C2 extraction, IOC production, and YARA rule authoring. Use when handed a suspicious file, hash, or sample, when triaging an alert artifact, or when producing detection content from a specimen.

Author durable YARA detection rules — meta/strings/condition anatomy, string types and modifiers, structural conditions with file magic and offsets, the PE/ELF/math/hash modules, specificity-vs-durability tuning, atom-aware performance, memory and process scanning, and YARA-X. Use when writing a YARA rule, creating a signature for a malware family or a file/memory artifact, turning IOCs or a captured sample into a detection, or hunting for a family across a corpus with Retrohunt or an on-host scanner.

Analyze raw shellcode and position-independent code — extracting the bytes, guessing architecture, disassembling at the right base, decoding self-decoder stubs, resolving hashed Windows APIs, emulating to the decoded stage, and pulling C2 and stage IOCs. Use when handed a raw blob of position-independent code, an extracted payload with no PE/ELF header, shellcode lifted from an exploit or a macro/loader, a `\x`-escaped or base64 buffer, a suspected Cobalt Strike or Metasploit stager, or an egg-hunter.

Author and maintain Sigma detection rules — structure, logsource taxonomy, detection logic with modifiers, false-positive filtering, backend conversion with pySigma, and offline validation with Hayabusa or Chainsaw. Use when translating threat intel into vendor-agnostic detection logic, building a detection-as-code pipeline around Sigma, reviewing or tuning existing Sigma rules, or converting rules across SIEM backends.

Harden and monitor a Kubernetes cluster against the attacks that actually happen — RBAC least privilege and escalation paths, Pod Security Admission enforcement, network policy default-deny, secrets and service-account token exposure, control-plane and kubelet exposure, and audit-log-based detection. Use when reviewing a cluster's security posture, responding to a suspected cluster compromise, deciding what to enforce and detect, or translating an attack path from attacking-eks-gke-aks into a defense.

Perform dead-disk forensics on an acquired disk image using The Sleuth Kit, Plaso, and bulk_extractor — verify integrity and mount read-only, map partitions, recover deleted files, build a file-system and super-timeline, carve unallocated space, mine registry hives and OS artifacts, and detect anti-forensics. Use when handed a .E01/.dd/.raw/.vmdk/.vhdx disk image or forensic acquisition to examine, recovering deleted files, building a file-system timeline, or carving artifacts from unallocated space.

Build, test, and tune detection content — Sigma, YARA, Suricata, and EDR/SIEM queries — mapped to MITRE ATT&CK with explicit false-positive analysis and detection-as-code practices. Use when writing or reviewing a detection rule, converting IOCs or TTPs into alerts, measuring detection coverage, or reducing alert fatigue.

Analyze volatile memory images (RAM dumps) using Volatility 3 — process enumeration, injected code detection, credential extraction, network artifacts, rootkit analysis, and timeline construction from memory-resident data. Use when examining a memory capture from a compromised host, hunting for injected code or hollowed processes, extracting credentials or network state from RAM, or detecting kernel-level rootkits.

Proactively harden a cloud account or organization before an incident — prioritizing IAM and identity risk over checkbox findings, closing the exposures that become attack paths (public storage, over-broad roles, missing audit logging, unencrypted data), reading CSPM output critically, and enforcing guardrails at the org level. Use when reviewing a cloud environment's security posture, triaging a Prowler/ScoutSuite/Security Hub report, deciding which misconfigurations actually matter, or setting preventive controls across AWS, Azure, or GCP.

Run digital forensics and incident response — triage, evidence acquisition with chain of custody, host and cloud artifact analysis, timeline reconstruction, scoping, containment, eradication, and postmortem. Use during a suspected compromise, when analyzing a disk or memory image, reconstructing an attacker timeline, or answering how far an intrusion spread.

Investigate security incidents in Microsoft 365 and Entra ID (Azure AD) -- search the Unified Audit Log, correlate sign-in and audit events, trace illicit OAuth consent grants, analyze mailbox rule manipulation, and contain compromised identities. Use when responding to a BEC incident, investigating Entra ID compromise, analyzing suspicious OAuth app permissions, tracing mail forwarding abuse, or reviewing Azure AD sign-in anomalies.

Prioritize and drive remediation of a vulnerability backlog by real risk, not raw CVSS — combining severity with exploitation signals (EPSS, CISA KEV), asset exposure and business context, using SSVC-style decisions, distinguishing reachable from merely present, and tracking remediation and exceptions. Use when triaging scanner output, deciding what to patch first, building a risk-based vulnerability management process, or explaining why a critical CVE is not the top priority.

Work a security alert queue to a defensible disposition — separating true positives from false positives and benign true positives, reasoning about base rates before escalating, ordering enrichment by cheapest discriminator, time-boxing, and documenting negative results so a closed alert is evidence rather than a guess. Use when triaging SOC or EDR alerts, deciding whether an alert warrants incident response, working through an alert backlog, or determining why a detection keeps firing.

Analyze packet captures and network telemetry for intrusion evidence — capture and handling, the Wireshark/tshark triage funnel, Zeek log mining, Suricata rule runs, beacon and DNS-tunnel detection, TLS/JA3 fingerprinting, HTTP and file carving, exfiltration hunting, and IOC handoff. Use when a `.pcap` or `.pcapng` capture lands on your desk, when a suspected C2 beacon needs confirming, when there is data exfiltration to investigate, when malware network behaviour must be characterized from what it emitted, when a Zeek or Suricata alert needs running down, or when DNS tunneling or unusual TLS is suspected.

Triage and forensically analyze reported phishing safely — extract the raw message, read the Received chain, verify SPF/DKIM/DMARC, detect display-name and lookalike spoofing, unwrap redirects and SafeLinks/URLDefense, decode quishing QR codes, triage attachments, and pull IOCs for hunting. Use when handed a reported phishing email, a suspicious .eml or .msg file, a set of email headers to analyze, a malicious attachment or link to triage, or a business email compromise or spoofing case.

Systematically identify and analyze persistence mechanisms on Linux systems during DFIR investigations -- sweep systemd units, cron jobs, shell initialization, SSH config, kernel modules, LD_PRELOAD, package manager hooks, udev rules, container entrypoints, and XDG autostart entries. Use when investigating a compromised Linux host, performing forensic analysis of a Linux disk image, looking for backdoors or unauthorized access mechanisms, or determining how an attacker maintained access.

Investigate security incidents in Amazon Web Services -- reconstruct attacker activity from CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and GuardDuty, anchor the investigation on the compromised principal (access key or role), trace privilege escalation and persistence through IAM API calls, detect data exfiltration and crypto-mining, and contain without destroying evidence or tipping off the attacker. Use when responding to a suspected AWS compromise, exposed access keys, anomalous CloudTrail activity, a GuardDuty finding, unexpected IAM changes, crypto-mining EC2 instances, or S3 data exfiltration.

Investigate a security incident in Google Cloud — establishing what audit logging exists before trusting a gap, reconstructing activity from Cloud Audit Logs, triaging service-account and OAuth abuse, following Security Command Center findings, and scoping IAM and resource changes. Use when responding to a suspected GCP compromise, investigating a leaked service-account key, working a Security Command Center or Event Threat Detection alert, or reconstructing what a principal did across a GCP organization.

Investigate security incidents in Microsoft Azure (resource and subscription control plane) -- reconstruct attacker activity from the Azure Activity Log and resource/data-plane diagnostic logs, anchor the investigation on the identity that made the calls (a user, service principal, or managed identity), trace privilege escalation through role assignments, hunt managed-identity token abuse and VM run-command code execution, and detect storage or Key Vault data theft while correlating back to Entra sign-in logs. Use when responding to a suspected Azure resource compromise, anomalous Azure Activity Log entries, a Microsoft Defender for Cloud alert, managed-identity or service-principal abuse, a crypto-mining VM, or storage-account exfiltration.

Produce cyber threat intelligence by pivoting on indicators to find related infrastructure, tracking actors and campaigns, enriching and contextualizing IOCs, applying attribution discipline and analytic confidence, and packaging finished intel products tied to a consumer's decision. Covers the intelligence lifecycle, the Diamond Model and Pyramid of Pain, STIX/MISP/OpenCTI storage, TLP sharing, and passive enrichment via passive DNS, crt.sh, Shodan, Censys, GreyNoise, and VirusTotal. Use when pivoting from a domain, IP, hash, or certificate to related infrastructure, tracking a threat actor or campaign, enriching raw indicators, writing a finished intel report, assessing an external report's relevance to your org, or building a threat model of adversaries that matter to you.

Investigate a compromised or suspicious Windows host from on-disk artifacts -- triage collection, evidence of execution (Prefetch, Amcache, Shimcache, SRUM, UserAssist, BAM), the event-log workhorses by ID (Security 4624/4688/4720/7045/1102, Sysmon, PowerShell 4104, RDP, WMI), persistence hunting across every autostart, lateral-movement traces, $MFT/USN filesystem forensics, anti-forensics detection, and building a super-timeline with the Eric Zimmerman suite, Chainsaw, Hayabusa, and Plaso. Use when triaging a compromised or suspicious Windows host, working through EVTX/Sysmon logs, reconstructing what executed on a Windows machine, hunting persistence and lateral-movement traces, or analyzing a KAPE/triage collection.