Engineering Detections

Engineering Detections

A detection is a hypothesis about attacker behaviour, expressed as a query, that a human will be paged for. Two properties decide whether it is worth deploying: does it fire on the behaviour, and does it stay quiet otherwise. Most rules fail the second test, and the cost is paid by whoever is on call.

When to Use

• Writing a new detection rule from a TTP, a sample, or an incident
• Reviewing or tuning an existing rule that is noisy or silent
• Converting threat intelligence into deployable detection content
• Assessing detection coverage against ATT&CK
• Setting up detection-as-code: repo layout, testing, CI, deployment

When NOT to Use

• Searching for an unknown compromise right now — use hunting-threats
• Working an active incident — use responding-to-incidents
• Analyzing the sample the detection is for — use analyzing-malware
• Authoring a file/memory signature — use writing-yara-rules; a log/SIEM rule — use writing-sigma-rules
• Preventive controls and hardening — hardening is not detection; a rule is not a substitute for closing the path

Route to a Depth Skill

This skill covers the whole detection lifecycle across Sigma, YARA, and Suricata; reach for writing-sigma-rules when the task is the Sigma rule itself and its conversion to a target SIEM.

Detect Behaviour, Not Artifacts

Rank what you write by how expensive it is for the adversary to change:

Hash              trivial to change      → block, don't alert
IP / domain       days                   → block + low-severity alert
Filename / path   trivial                → weak signal, combine only
Tooling artifact  weeks (recompile)      → good, decays
Behaviour / TTP   expensive              → this is the target

The pyramid-of-pain reasoning is the whole discipline: a rule on mimikatz.exe is worthless; a rule on a process opening a handle to LSASS with PROCESS_VM_READ catches every tool that does the same thing.

The Rule Development Loop

1. Hypothesis   → what behaviour, by whom, visible where?
2. Data check   → is the required telemetry actually collected and retained?
3. Draft        → write the logic against real data
4. FP analysis  → run over 30+ days of production data, characterize every hit
5. Tune         → narrow with attacker-independent conditions only
6. Test         → prove it fires on an emulated true positive
7. Document     → triage steps, response, and known limits
8. Deploy       → with a severity that matches the actual response
9. Review       → re-test after telemetry, environment, or tooling changes

Step 2 kills more rules than any other. Before writing logic, confirm the field exists, is populated on the platforms you care about, and is retained long enough to matter. A rule on a field your agent does not ship is a coverage illusion — worse than no rule, because it appears on the map.

Writing Sigma

Sigma is the portable format; write once, convert per backend.

title: LSASS Memory Access from Unusual Process
id: 9f2b1c4e-0000-4000-8000-000000000001
status: experimental
description: >
  Detects a process obtaining a handle to lsass.exe with read/clone access,
  the common precondition for credential dumping regardless of tooling.
references:
  - https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1003/001/
author: secskills
date: 2026-07-26
logsource:
  product: windows
  category: process_access
detection:
  selection:
    TargetImage|endswith: '\lsass.exe'
    GrantedAccess|contains:
      # QUERY_LIMITED_INFORMATION 0x1000 | QUERY_INFORMATION 0x0400
      # VM_READ 0x0010 | VM_WRITE 0x0020 | VM_OPERATION 0x0008
      - '0x1010'   # QUERY_LIMITED | VM_READ        — minimum to read lsass
      - '0x1410'   # QUERY_LIMITED | QUERY_INFO | VM_READ
      - '0x1438'   # the classic mimikatz mask: adds VM_WRITE | VM_OPERATION
  filter_legitimate:
    SourceImage|startswith:
      - 'C:\Program Files\<your EDR>'
      - 'C:\Windows\System32\wbem\WmiPrvSE.exe'
  condition: selection and not filter_legitimate
falsepositives:
  - EDR and backup agents; enumerate yours and filter by full path
  - Windows Error Reporting on crash
level: high
tags:
  - attack.credential-access
  - attack.t1003.001

Conversion:

sigma convert -t splunk -p sysmon rules/lsass_access.yml
sigma convert -t esql -p ecs_windows rules/lsass_access.yml     # Elastic
sigma convert -t kusto -p microsoft_xdr rules/lsass_access.yml  # Defender/Sentinel

Tuning rules that stay honest: filter on things the attacker cannot choose. Full paths of signed vendor binaries, specific service SIDs, and parent-child pairs are acceptable. Filtering on a filename, a username string, or a command-line fragment the attacker controls is not tuning — it is building the bypass into the rule.

Writing Network Detections

alert http $HOME_NET any -> $EXTERNAL_NET any (
    msg:"Beacon: HTTP POST, no User-Agent, fixed small body";
    flow:established,to_server;
    http.method; content:"POST";
    http.header_names; content:!"User-Agent";
    threshold:type both, track by_src, count 10, seconds 600;
    classtype:trojan-activity;
    metadata:attack_target Client_Endpoint, mitre_technique_id T1071;
    sid:1000101; rev:1;
)

For encrypted traffic, detect on metadata rather than content: JA3/JA4 fingerprints, certificate anomalies, SNI/DNS patterns, and — most durably — beacon timing. Regular intervals with jitter are hard for an operator to give up without losing reliability.

-- Beacon candidate: low variance in connection interval, sustained
SELECT src_ip, dst_ip, count(*) AS n,
       stddev(delta_seconds) AS jitter, avg(delta_seconds) AS interval
FROM connection_deltas
WHERE ts > now() - interval '7 days'
GROUP BY src_ip, dst_ip
HAVING count(*) > 50 AND stddev(delta_seconds) < 0.15 * avg(delta_seconds)
ORDER BY n DESC;

Writing YARA for Detection at Scale

Rules that run on every file on every endpoint have a different cost profile from analysis rules. Anchor with cheap conditions first.

rule Suspicious_Loader_Pattern
{
    meta:
        author = "secskills"
        date   = "2026-07-26"
        scope  = "endpoint scanning"      // vs. hunting/triage
    condition:
        // Cheap gates before expensive string matching
        uint16(0) == 0x5A4D and filesize < 500KB and
        pe.imports("kernel32.dll", "VirtualAlloc") and
        pe.imports("kernel32.dll", "CreateThread") and
        math.entropy(0, filesize) > 7.0
}

Always test against a goodware corpus before deployment. A YARA rule with a 0.1% false-positive rate across a million-file fleet is a thousand alerts.

False-Positive Analysis Is the Job

Never deploy on the strength of "it looked right." The required evidence:

# Emulate the behaviour to prove the rule fires
atomic-red-team -T T1003.001              # Atomic Red Team
caldera / prelude operator                 # adversary emulation frameworks
# Then confirm: alert fired, fields populated, triage steps sufficient

If a rule cannot be tested because emulating it is unsafe, say so in the documentation and label the rule unvalidated. Do not let it pass silently as tested coverage.

Coverage Measurement

Map rules to ATT&CK, but read the map correctly.

# Generate a layer for the ATT&CK Navigator from your rule set
python3 scripts/rules_to_navigator.py rules/ > coverage.json

Honest coverage accounting:

• A technique is covered only if the rule was tested against an emulation of it and the required telemetry is collected fleet-wide.
• One rule per technique is not coverage — techniques have many procedures. T1055 (process injection) has a dozen materially different implementations.
• Report coverage as tested/untested/no-telemetry, never as a single percentage. A green Navigator layer built from untested rules is the most common way security teams deceive themselves.

Detection as Code

detections/
├── rules/            # Sigma source of truth, one file per rule
├── tests/            # unit tests: sample events → expected match/no-match
├── filters/          # environment-specific allowlists, kept OUT of the rules
├── deployed/         # generated backend queries (build artifact, never edited)
└── .github/workflows/ci.yml

CI should: lint and schema-validate every rule, verify every rule has a unique id and a non-empty falsepositives, run unit tests, convert to each target backend, and fail on conversion errors. Version rules, review them in pull requests, and keep environment filters separate from detection logic so a rule can be shared or upstreamed without leaking your environment.

Rationalizations to Reject

• "We'll tune it after deployment." Untuned rules train analysts to close alerts without reading them, which is worse than the missing detection.
• "It's noisy but the analysts can handle it." Alert fatigue is a security control failure with a body count. Measure the volume first.
• "We have a rule for that technique." Which procedure? Tested how? On which platforms is the telemetry present?
• "The vendor rule covers it." Read it. Vendor defaults are tuned for the average customer, not your environment.
• "Add the hash to the rule." Then the rule is dead on the next build.
• "We'll filter out that noisy host." If the exclusion is attacker-reachable, you just published a bypass. Filter on properties the attacker cannot assume.
• "No alerts means we're clean." No alerts means no alerts. Validate with emulation.

ATT&CK Coverage

Generated from secskills-core/ttp-index.json — edit that file, then run python3 scripts/sync_attack.py --write. Re-verify IDs against the current ATT&CK release before citing them in a report.

Credential Access (TA0006)

• T1003.001 LSASS Memory — see also attacking-active-directory

Command and Control (TA0011)

• T1071 Application Layer Protocol — see also analyzing-malware, analyzing-network-traffic
• T1071.004 DNS — see also hunting-threats, analyzing-network-traffic
• T1573 Encrypted Channel — see also analyzing-malware, analyzing-network-traffic

Detection content for any of these: engineering-detections. Proactive search: hunting-threats. Post-compromise: responding-to-incidents.

Reading External Sources

Fetch public advisories, specifications, and vendor reports as Markdown:

curl -sL "https://defuddle.md/<url>"      # scheme in the path is optional

This strips page boilerplate — roughly 78% fewer tokens on a prose page — and returns the full text rather than a summary, so you can grep it and trust a negative result.

Three things it is not for. Fetch JSON and API responses raw, because readability extraction mangles structured data. Fetch authenticated or JavaScript-rendered pages directly, because it retrieves them anonymously. And never route adversary infrastructure (phishing links, C2, malware hosting), client-owned hosts, or engagement URLs through it — the request leaves your machine to a third party, and for live adversary infrastructure it also tips off the operator.

Some sites block the extractor and return an error blob rather than the page — {"error":"Failed to fetch: 418 I'm a teapot"} from freedesktop.org, for instance. That is the fetch being refused, not the source saying the thing does not exist. Re-fetch the URL directly before drawing any conclusion from it.

References

• hunting-threats — hunts that mature into detections
• analyzing-malware — capability analysis that seeds rule logic
• responding-to-incidents — incidents that expose detection gaps
• MITRE ATT&CK, Sigma (SigmaHQ), Atomic Red Team, MITRE CAR, Elastic detection rules
• Alerting and Detection Strategy (ADS) framework for rule documentation