git:20260617.c5d2c7b to git:20260629.bacf523

---

name: sota-detection-engineering

description: >-

State-of-the-art detection engineering, SOC, threat hunting, and incident

response (2026). Use when BUILDING detective controls or SOC capability —

honeytoken, canary, OCSF, detection coverage, MTTD, false positive.

---

# SOTA Detection Engineering, SOC & Incident Response

## Purpose

Assume prevention fails. This skill builds and audits the layer that *notices*:

detective controls, the SOC that triages them, the hunts that find what alerts

miss, and the IR process that contains what hunts surface. One question defines

success:

> **When a real adversary acts inside your environment, does a high-fidelity

> signal fire, reach a human (or automation) with the context to act, and drive

> a bounded response — fast enough to matter?**

Detection is engineering, not art. Detections are **code**: version-controlled,

peer-reviewed, CI-tested, ATT&CK-mapped, FP-budgeted, and retired when stale.

The dominant failure mode is not missing rules — it is **alert fatigue**: noise

that buries the one true positive. Optimize signal-to-noise relentlessly.

**Ownership boundary.** `sota-observability` owns the telemetry pipeline (logs,

metrics, traces, SLOs, log shipping, retention plumbing). This skill owns

turning that telemetry into *security* detections, the SOC workflow, hunting,

and IR. `sota-threat-modeling` owns design-time threat enumeration (STRIDE/

ATT&CK/ATLAS catalogs); this skill owns catching those threats at runtime. If

you find yourself designing the logging schema, that's observability rules/01;

if you find yourself enumerating threats on a DFD, that's threat-modeling.

## BUILD mode

Run the detection lifecycle as a loop, not a one-shot. Hypothesis → build →

test → deploy → tune → retire. Workflow:

1. **Start from a threat hypothesis, not a tool.** Name the ATT&CK technique or

abuse case, the adversary behavior, and the telemetry that would witness it.

Use the **ADS framework** (Palantir): goal, categorization (ATT&CK), strategy

abstract, technical context, blind spots/assumptions, false positives,

validation, priority. Write this *before* the rule.

2. **Confirm the log source exists first.** You cannot detect what you do not

collect. Map the hypothesis to a concrete data source (EDR, cloud audit, K8s

audit, network/flow, identity, app). If it's missing, the deliverable is a

*logging gap*, not a rule. See rules/02.

3. **Detect behavior over artifacts.** Climb the **Pyramid of Pain**: prefer

TTP/behavioral logic over brittle hashes/IPs/domains. IOC matches are cheap

and disposable; TTP detections cost the adversary real money to evade.

4. **Pick the right engine** (rules/03): Sigma for log detections (vendor-

agnostic, compiled to your SIEM), YARA-X for file/memory/malware, Suricata

for network, Falco/Tetragon for eBPF runtime/container/K8s, SIEM-native

(KQL/SPL/EQL) for correlation the portable formats can't express.

5. **Engineer for low FP from the start** (rules/04): scope tightly, add

allowlist context, require corroboration for noisy signals, set a severity

honestly. Every detection ships with a runbook (link to observability

rules/04 alerting plumbing) and an owner.

6. **Test before deploy.** Validate with adversary emulation — Atomic Red Team

(endpoint), Stratus Red Team (cloud), Caldera (campaigns). Confirm the

detection fires on the real technique and stays quiet on benign baselines.

No detection merges without a passing test. See rules/06.

7. **Map coverage and find gaps.** Track every detection against ATT&CK with the

Navigator. Coverage heatmaps reveal blind spots — feed them back to step 1.

8. **Tune and retire.** Review FP rates, suppress with *expiry* (never forever),

delete detections nobody trusts. A muted alert is worse than none.

For hunting and deception, see rules/05; for IR, see rules/06.

## AUDIT mode

Assess an existing detection/SOC/IR posture adversarially. Read rules/06 (IR &

validation) and rules/04 (SOC/triage) first. Sample real detections, real

alerts, and real incidents — do not trust a coverage dashboard or a wiki

runbook that has never fired. The cardinal test: pick three ATT&CK techniques

relevant to the environment and prove, end to end, that each would be caught.

**Severity:**

| Severity | Meaning | Examples |

|----------|---------|----------|

| Critical | Blind to a primary attack path, or IR cannot execute | No log source for the crown-jewel system; no EDR/cloud-audit/K8s-audit collection; no IR plan or no one on call; detections exist but nothing routes alerts to a human |

| High | Major coverage gap or SOC dysfunction | Alert fatigue (analysts mute/ignore); detections never tested against the technique; IOC-only coverage of behaviors that need TTP logic; runbooks absent or stale; no ATT&CK coverage map; retention too short for IR |

| Medium | Degraded fidelity or process gaps | Detections with no owner/ADS doc; suppressions with no expiry; no deduplication/correlation; severity inflation; no purple-team/regression testing; TI not operationalized into detections |

| Low | Hygiene | Detections not in version control; inconsistent naming; no FP metrics; Navigator layer stale; no blameless PIR template |

| Info | Observation / hardening opportunity | Deception not deployed where it'd be high-value; coverage maturity below target; SOAR automation candidates |

**Finding format** (one per finding):

```

file:line | rule | severity | effort (trivial/small/medium/large) | fix

```

Example:

```

detections/aws/iam.yml:14 | ioc-only-detection-of-ttp-behavior | High | medium |

GuardDuty-finding-name match is brittle; rewrite as CloudTrail behavioral

Sigma rule on CreateAccessKey+AttachUserPolicy by non-admin principal,

test with Stratus Red Team aws.persistence.iam-create-admin-access-key.

```

Conclude with the verdict: **for the top 3 techniques in scope, is detection

PRESENT / PARTIAL / ABSENT end-to-end** (signal → alert → human → response),

and the shortest path to closing the worst gap.

## Rules index

| File | Read this when... |

|------|-------------------|

| `rules/01-detection-engineering-discipline.md` | Running the detection lifecycle, writing ADS docs, doing detection-as-code (CI/peer review/regression), mapping coverage to ATT&CK + Navigator, applying the Pyramid of Pain, picking maturity targets and metrics (coverage/precision/MTTD) |

| `rules/02-telemetry-siem-data-layer.md` | Deciding what to collect (the #1 gap), choosing SIEM/data-lake, normalizing with OCSF/ECS, sizing retention for IR/hunting, controlling volume/cost, assessing data quality |

| `rules/03-rule-languages-engines.md` | Choosing and writing detections in Sigma, YARA/YARA-X, Suricata, Falco, Tetragon, or SIEM-native (KQL/SPL/EQL); rule quality, specificity, FP-resistance, performance; good/bad examples |

| `rules/04-alerting-triage-soc-soar.md` | Fighting alert fatigue, tuning/suppression with expiry, severity assignment, enrichment, dedup/correlation, runbooks, SOAR + auto-containment guardrails, case management, FP lifecycle, SOC metrics |

| `rules/05-hunting-intel-deception.md` | Hypothesis-driven hunting + the hunt loop, IOC vs IOA/TTP hunting, threat-intel lifecycle + TIP, STIX 2.1/TAXII 2.1, diamond model/kill chain, deception (honeypots/honeytokens/canaries) |

| `rules/06-incident-response-validation.md` | Running IR (NIST SP 800-61r3 / CSF 2.0, PICERL), playbooks, severity classification, containment/eradication/recovery, forensic readiness + chain of custody, blameless PIR, tabletops; validating detections via Atomic Red Team/Caldera/Stratus, purple teaming, regression testing |

## Top 10 non-negotiables

1. **You can't detect what you don't collect.** The #1 gap is telemetry, not

rules. Audit log-source coverage against your attack paths before writing a

single detection.

2. **Detections are code.** Version-controlled, peer-reviewed, CI-tested,

ATT&CK-mapped, with an owner and an ADS doc. A detection that isn't tested

isn't a detection — it's a hope.

3. **Every detection is validated against the real technique.** Atomic Red Team

/ Stratus / Caldera proves it fires; a benign baseline proves it stays

quiet. No merge without both.

4. **Climb the Pyramid of Pain.** Prefer TTP/behavioral logic over hashes/IPs/

domains. IOCs are a supplement and an enrichment, never the strategy.

5. **Signal-to-noise is the product.** Alert fatigue is the dominant SOC

failure. Tune aggressively, suppress with *expiry*, and treat a chronically

ignored alert as a Critical defect.

6. **Every alert has a runbook and an owner.** No actionable signal reaches a

human without next steps. Wire alerting plumbing via sota-observability

rules/04; you own the *security* content.

7. **Map coverage to ATT&CK and stare at the gaps.** A Navigator heatmap that

nobody updates is theater. Coverage drives the next hypothesis.

8. **Behavior-detect, then enrich.** Correlate, deduplicate, and decorate alerts

with asset/identity/TI context so triage is seconds, not minutes.

9. **An IR plan that's never exercised is fiction.** Tabletop it, keep contacts

and authority-to-contain current, and run blameless post-incident reviews

that feed new detections.

10. **Deception is the highest-fidelity signal you own.** A touched honeytoken

or honeypot has ~zero false positives. Deploy canaries in the paths

attackers must traverse (see sota-secrets-management rules/04 honeytokens).