Awesome Threat Detection and Hunting

A curated list of awesome threat detection and hunting resources

Threat Detection and Hunting

🔨 Tools
🔍 Detection Rules
📑 Dataset
📘 Resources
- Frameworks
- Windows
- MacOS
- Osquery
- DNS
- Fingerprinting
- Data Science
- Research Papers
- Blogs
- Related Awesome Lists
🎙️ Podcasts
🗞️ Newsletters
🎥 Videos
👩‍🎓 Trainings
👩‍💻 Labs
🤖 Twitter

Threat Simulation

🪓 Tools
📕 Resources

Contribute
License

Tools

MITRE ATT&CK Navigator (source code) - The ATT&CK Navigator is designed to provide basic navigation and annotation of ATT&CK matrices, something that people are already doing today in tools like Excel.
HELK - A Hunting ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) with advanced analytic capabilities.
DetectionLab - Vagrant & Packer scripts to build a lab environment complete with security tooling and logging best practices.
Revoke-Obfuscation - PowerShell Obfuscation Detection Framework.
Invoke-ATTACKAPI - A PowerShell script to interact with the MITRE ATT&CK Framework via its own API.
Unfetter - A reference implementation provides a framework for collecting events (process creation, network connections, Window Event Logs, etc.) from a client machine and performing CAR analytics to detect potential adversary activity.
Flare - An analytical framework for network traffic and behavioral analytics.
RedHunt-OS - A Virtual Machine for Adversary Emulation and Threat Hunting. RedHunt aims to be a one stop shop for all your threat emulation and threat hunting needs by integrating attacker's arsenal as well as defender's toolkit to actively identify the threats in your environment.
Oriana - Lateral movement and threat hunting tool for Windows environments built on Django comes Docker ready.
Bro-Osquery - Bro integration with osquery
Brosquery - A module for osquery to load Bro logs into tables
DeepBlueCLI - A PowerShell Module for Hunt Teaming via Windows Event Logs
Uncoder - An online translator for SIEM saved searches, filters, queries, API requests, correlation and Sigma rules
CimSweep - A suite of CIM/WMI-based tools that enable the ability to perform incident response and hunting operations remotely across all versions of Windows
Dispatch - An open-source crisis management orchestration framework
EQL - Event Query Language
EQLLib - The Event Query Language Analytics Library (eqllib) is a library of event based analytics, written in EQL to detect adversary behaviors identified in MITRE ATT&CK™.
BZAR (Bro/Zeek ATT&CK-based Analytics and Reporting) - A set of Zeek scripts to detect ATT&CK techniques
Security Onion - An open-source Linux distribution for threat hunting, security monitoring, and log management. It includes ELK, Snort, Suricata, Zeek, Wazuh, Sguil, and many other security tools
Varna - A quick & cheap AWS CloudTrail Monitoring with Event Query Language (EQL)
BinaryAlert - Serverless, real-time & retroactive malware detection
hollows_hunter - Scans all running processes, recognizes and dumps a variety of potentially malicious implants (replaced/implanted PEs, shellcodes, hooks, in-memory patches).
ThreatHunting - A Splunk app mapped to MITRE ATT&CK to guide your threat hunts
Sentinel Attack - A repository of Azure Sentinel alerts and hunting queries leveraging sysmon and the MITRE ATT&CK framework
Brim - A desktop application to efficiently search large packet captures and Zeek logs
YARA - The pattern matching swiss knife
Intel Owl - An Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT solution to get threat intelligence data about a specific file, an IP or a domain from a single API at scale.
Capa - An open-source tool to identify capabilities in executable files.
Splunk Security Content Splunk-curated detection content that can easily be used accross many SIEMs (see Uncoder Rule Converter.)
Threat Bus - Threat intelligence dissemination layer to connect security tools through a distributed publish/subscribe message broker.
VAST - A network telemetry engine for data-driven security investigations.
zeek2es - An open source tool to convert Zeek logs to Elastic/OpenSearch. You can also output pure JSON from Zeek's TSV logs!
LogSlash: A standard for reducing log volume without sacrificing analytical capability.
SOC-Multitool: A powerful and user-friendly browser extension that streamlines investigations for security professionals.
Zeek Analysis Tools (ZAT): Processing and analysis of Zeek network data with Pandas, scikit-learn, Kafka and Spark.
ProcMon for Linux
Synthetic Adversarial Log Objects (SALO) - A framework for the generation of log events without the need for infrastructure or actions to initiate the event that causes a log event.

Detection, Alerting and Automation Platforms

ElastAlert - A framework for alerting on anomalies, spikes, or other patterns of interest from data in Elasticsearch
StreamAlert - A serverless, realtime data analysis framework which empowers you to ingest, analyze, and alert on data from any environment, using datasources and alerting logic you define
Matano: An open source security lake platform (SIEM alternative) for threat hunting, detection and response on AWS. Matano lets you write advanced detections as code (using python) to correlate and alert on threats in realtime.
Shuffle: A general purpose security automation platform.

Endpoint Monitoring

osquery (github) - SQL powered operating system instrumentation, monitoring, and analytics
Kolide Fleet - A flexible control server for osquery fleets
Zeek Agent - An endpoint monitoring agent that provides host activity to Zeek
Velociraptor - Endpoint visibility and collection tool
Sysdig - A tool for deep Linux system visibility, with native support for containers. Think about sysdig as strace + tcpdump + htop + iftop + lsof + …awesome sauce
go-audit - An alternative to the Linux auditd daemon
Sysmon - A Windows system service and device driver that monitors and logs system activity to the Windows event log
Sysmon for Linux
OSSEC - An open-source Host-based Intrusion Detection System (HIDS)
WAZUH - An open-source security platform

Configuration

sysmon-DFIR - Sources, configuration and how to detect evil things utilizing Microsoft Sysmon.
sysmon-config - Sysmon configuration file template with default high-quality event tracing.
sysmon-modular - A repository of sysmon configuration modules. It also includes a mapping of Sysmon configurations to MITRE ATT&CK techniques.
auditd configuration
osquery-configuration - A repository for using osquery for incident detection and response.

Network Monitoring

Zeek (formerly Bro) - A network security monitoring tool
ntopng - A web-based network traffic monitoring tool
Suricata - A network threat detection engine
Snort (github) - A network intrusion detection tool
Joy - A package for capturing and analyzing network flow data and intraflow data, for network research, forensics, and security monitoring
Netcap - A framework for secure and scalable network traffic analysis
Moloch - A large scale and open source full packet capture and search tool
Stenographer - A full-packet-capture tool

Fingerprinting Tools

JA3 - A method for profiling SSL/TLS Clients and Servers
HASSH - Profiling Method for SSH Clients and Servers
RDFP - Zeek Remote desktop fingerprinting script based on FATT (Fingerprint All The Things)
FATT - A pyshark based script for extracting network metadata and fingerprints from pcap files and live network traffic
FingerprinTLS - A TLS fingerprinting method
Mercury - Network fingerprinting and packet metadata capture
GQUIC Protocol Analyzer for Zeek
Recog - A framework for identifying products, services, operating systems, and hardware by matching fingerprints against data returned from various network probes
Hfinger - Fingerprinting HTTP requests
JARM - An active Transport Layer Security (TLS) server fingerprinting tool.

Detection Rules

Sigma - Generic Signature Format for SIEM Systems
Splunk Detections and Analytic stories
Elastic Detection Rules
MITRE CAR - The Cyber Analytics Repository is a knowledge base of analytics developed by MITRE based on the Adversary Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK™) adversary model.
Awesome YARA Rules
Chronicle Detection Rules - Collection of YARA-L 2.0 sample rules for the Chronicle Detection API.
GCP Security Analytics - Community Security Analytics provides a set of community-driven audit & threat queries for Google Cloud.

Dataset

Mordor - Pre-recorded security events generated by simulated adversarial techniques in the form of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files. The data is categorized by platforms, adversary groups, tactics and techniques defined by the Mitre ATT&CK Framework.
SecRepo.com(github repo) - Samples of security related data.
Boss of the SOC (BOTS) Dataset Version 1
Boss of the SOC (BOTS) Dataset Version 2
Boss of the SOC (BOTS) Dataset Version 3
EMBER (paper) - The EMBER dataset is a collection of features from PE files that serve as a benchmark dataset for researchers
theZoo - A repository of LIVE malwares
CIC Datasets - Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity datasets
Netresec's PCAP repo list - A list of public packet capture repositories, which are freely available on the Internet.
PCAP-ATTACK - A repo of PCAP samples for different ATT&CK techniques.
EVTX-ATTACK-SAMPLES - A repo of Windows event samples (EVTX) associated with ATT&CK techniques (EVTX-ATT&CK Sheet).
Public Security Log Sharing Site
attack_data - A repository of curated datasets from various attacks.

Resources

Huntpedia - Your Threat Hunting Knowledge Compendium
Hunt Evil - Your Practical Guide to Threat Hunting
The Hunter's Handbook - Endgame's guide to adversary hunting
ThreatHunter-Playbook - A Threat hunter's playbook to aid the development of techniques and hypothesis for hunting campaigns.
The ThreatHunting Project - A great collection of hunts and threat hunting resources.
CyberThreatHunting - A collection of resources for threat hunters.
Hunt-Detect-Prevent - Lists of sources and utilities to hunt, detect and prevent evildoers.
Alerting and Detection Strategy Framework
Generating Hypotheses for Successful Threat Hunting
Expert Investigation Guide - Threat Hunting
Active Directory Threat Hunting
Threat Hunting for Fileless Malware
Windows Commands Abused by Attackers
Deception-as-Detection - Deception based detection techniques mapped to the MITRE’s ATT&CK framework.
On TTPs
Hunting On The Cheap (Slides)
Threat Hunting Techniques - AV, Proxy, DNS and HTTP Logs
Detecting Malware Beacons Using Splunk
Data Science Hunting Funnel
Use Python & Pandas to Create a D3 Force Directed Network Diagram
Syscall Auditing at Scale
Catching attackers with go-audit and a logging pipeline
The Coventry Conundrum of Threat Intelligence
Signal the ATT&CK: Part 1 - Building a real-time threat detection capability with Tanium that focuses on documented adversarial techniques.
SANS Summit Archives (DFIR, Cyber Defense) - Threat hunting, Blue Team and DFIR summit slides
Bro-Osquery - Large-Scale Host and Network Monitoring Using Open-Source Software
Malware Persistence - Collection of various information focused on malware persistence: detection (techniques), response, pitfalls and the log collection (tools).
Threat Hunting with Jupyter Notebooks
How Dropbox Security builds tools for threat detection and incident response
Introducing Event Query Language
The No Hassle Guide to Event Query Language (EQL) for Threat Hunting (PDF)
Introducing the Funnel of Fidelity (PDF)
Detection Spectrum (PDF)
Capability Abstraction (PDF)
Awesome YARA - A curated list of awesome YARA rules, tools, and resources
Defining ATT&CK Data Sources - A two-part blog series that outlines a new methodology to extend ATT&CK’s current data sources.
DETT&CT: MAPPING YOUR BLUE TEAM TO MITRE ATT&CK™ - A blog that describes how to align MITRE ATT&CK-based detection content with data sources.
Detection as Code in Splunk Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 - A multipart series describing how detection as code can be successfully deployed in a Splunk environment.
Lessons Learned in Detection Engineering - A well experienced detection engineer describes in detail his observations, challenges, and recommendations for building an effective threat detection program.
A Research-Driven process applied to Threat Detection Engineering Inputs.
A video series focused on malware execution and investigations using Elastic Security.

Frameworks

MITRE ATT&CK - A curated knowledge base and model for cyber adversary behavior, reflecting the various phases of an adversary’s lifecycle and the platforms they are known to target.
Alerting and Detection Strategies Framework - A framework for developing alerting and detection strategies.
A Simple Hunting Maturity Model - The Hunting Maturity Model describes five levels of organizational hunting capability, ranging from HMM0 (the least capability) to HMM4 (the most).
The Pyramic of Pain - The relationship between the types of indicators you might use to detect an adversary's activities and how much pain it will cause them when you are able to deny those indicators to them.
A Framework for Cyber Threat Hunting
The PARIS Model - A model for threat hunting.
Cyber Kill Chain - It is part of the Intelligence Driven Defense® model for identification and prevention of cyber intrusions activity. The model identifies what the adversaries must complete in order to achieve their objective.
The DML Model - The Detection Maturity Level (DML) model is a capability maturity model for referencing ones maturity in detecting cyber attacks.
NIST Cybersecurity Framework
OSSEM (Open Source Security Events Metadata) - A community-led project that focuses on the documentation and standardization of security event logs from diverse data sources and operating systems.
Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) - A framework for creating schemas and it also delivers a cybersecurity event schema built with the framework (schema browser).
MITRE Engage - A framework for planning and discussing adversary engagement operations that empowers you to engage your adversaries and achieve your cybersecurity goals.
MaGMa Use Case Defintion Model - A business-centric approach for planning and defining threat detection use cases.

Data Science

data_hacking - Examples of using IPython, Pandas, and Scikit Learn to get the most out of your security data.
Reverse engineering the analyst: building machine learning models for the SOC
msticpy - A library for InfoSec investigation and hunting in Jupyter Notebooks.

Research Papers

Intelligence-Driven Computer Network Defense Informed by Analysis of Adversary Campaigns and Intrusion Kill Chains
The Diamond Model of Intrusion Analysis
EXPOSURE: Finding Malicious Domains Using Passive DNS Analysis
A Comprehensive Approach to Intrusion Detection Alert Correlation (Paper, Dissertation)
On Botnets that use DNS for Command and Control
Intelligent, Automated Red Team Emulation
Machine Learning for Encrypted Malware Traffic Classification

Blogs

Podcasts

Google Cloud Security Podcast by Anton Chuvakin and Timothy Peacock.
Detection: Challenging Paradigms by SpecterOps
Darknet Diaries by Andy Greenberg - True stories from the dark side of the Internet.
Risky Business by Patrick Gray

Newsletters

Detection Engineering Weekly by Zack 'techy' Allen
This Week in 4n6 - A weekly roundup of digital forensics and incident response news.

Videos

Trainings

Applied Network Defense courses by Chris Sanders
Investigation theory, Practical threat hunting, Detection engineering with Sigma, etc.
Security Blue Team (BTL1 and BTL2 certificates)
LetsDefend - Hands-On SOC Analyst Training
TryHackMe - Hands-on cyber security training through real-world scenarios.
13Cubed, Investigating Windows Endpoints by Richard Davis
HackTheBox - While not directly related to threat detection, the website features training modules on general security and offensive topics that can be beneficial for junior SOC analysts.

Labs

DetectionLab - Vagrant & Packer scripts to build a lab environment complete with security tooling and logging best practices.
Splunk Boss of the SOC - Hands-on workshops and challenges to practice threat hunting using the BOTS and other datasets.
HELK - A Hunting ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) with advanced analytic capabilities.
BlueTeam Lab - A detection lab created with Terraform and Ansible in Azure.
attack_range - A tool that allows you to create vulnerable instrumented local or cloud environments to simulate attacks against and collect the data into Splunk.

Twitter

"Awesome Detection" Twitter List - Twitter accounts that tweet about threat detection, hunting and DFIR.

Threat Simulation Tools

MITRE CALDERA - An automated adversary emulation system that performs post-compromise adversarial behavior within Windows Enterprise networks.
APTSimulator - A Windows Batch script that uses a set of tools and output files to make a system look as if it was compromised.
Atomic Red Team - Small and highly portable detection tests mapped to the Mitre ATT&CK Framework.
Network Flight Simulator - flightsim is a lightweight utility used to generate malicious network traffic and help security teams to evaluate security controls and network visibility.
Metta - A security preparedness tool to do adversarial simulation.
Red Team Automation (RTA) - RTA provides a framework of scripts designed to allow blue teams to test their detection capabilities against malicious tradecraft, modeled after MITRE ATT&CK.
SharpShooter - Payload Generation Framework.
CACTUSTORCH - Payload Generation for Adversary Simulations.
DumpsterFire - A modular, menu-driven, cross-platform tool for building repeatable, time-delayed, distributed security events.
Empire(website) - A PowerShell and Python post-exploitation agent.
PowerSploit - A PowerShell Post-Exploitation Framework.
RedHunt-OS - A Virtual Machine for Adversary Emulation and Threat Hunting. RedHunt aims to be a one stop shop for all your threat emulation and threat hunting needs by integrating attacker's arsenal as well as defender's toolkit to actively identify the threats in your environment.
Infection Monkey - An open source Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) tool that assesses the resiliency of private and public cloud environments to post-breach attacks and lateral movement.
Splunk Attack Range - A tool that allows you to create vulnerable instrumented local or cloud environments to simulate attacks against and collect the data into Splunk.

Threat Simulation Resources

MITRE's Adversary Emulation Plans
Awesome Red Teaming - A list of awesome red teaming resources
Red-Team Infrastructure Wiki - Wiki to collect Red Team infrastructure hardening resources.
Payload Generation using SharpShooter
SpecterOps Blog
- Threat Hunting
Advanced Threat Tactics - A free course on red team operations and adversary simulations.
Signal the ATT&CK: Part 1 - Modelling APT32 in CALDERA
Red Teaming/Adversary Simulation Toolkit - A collection of open source and commercial tools that aid in red team operations.
C2 Matrix (Google Sheets)
adversaryemulationlibrary - An open library of adversary emulation plans designed to empower organizations to test their defenses based on real-world TTPs.

Contribute

Contributions welcome! Read the contribution guidelines first.

License

To the extent possible under law, Adel "0x4D31" Karimi has waived all copyright and
related or neighboring rights to this work.

Awesome Threat Detection and Hunting

Contents

Tools

Detection, Alerting and Automation Platforms

Endpoint Monitoring

Configuration

Network Monitoring

Fingerprinting Tools

Detection Rules

Dataset

Resources

Frameworks

Windows

Sysmon

PowerShell

MacOS

Osquery

DNS

Fingerprinting

Data Science

Research Papers

Blogs

Related Awesome Lists

Podcasts

Newsletters

Videos

Trainings

Labs

Twitter

Threat Simulation Tools

Threat Simulation Resources

Contribute

License