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Chris Sanders 🍯 Profile picture
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24 Jun, 5 tweets, 1 min read
Nope. There's often not even agreement within different detection teams in the same company.

I know of vendors who have used 5+ different languages to express detection logic at various points. Messy.
Some of these are companies that developed their own "standard" for expressing detection logic and don't even use it in most of their tools 😂
This comes from a lot of places. Usually, someone develops a detection tool by themselves or part of a small or isolated team and they choose what they want, then the project grows and it becomes painful to change it.
Sometimes, it's necessary because of the limitations of certain syntaxes. Like, you wouldn't use the Suricata rule language to find evil in files.
This isn't all custom development either. Most folks don't realize how just how many commercial detection tools are Snort, Suricata, or Zeek under the hood. When people build stuff in, they adopt those input and output limitations.

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More from @chrissanders88

Chris Sanders 🍯 Profile picture
24 Jun
While we're doing a Detection Engineering AMA, how do you build these sorta skills if you want to do that job for a living? Big question, but I'd focus on three areas for early career folks...
Investigative Experience -- Tuning detection involves investigating alerts from signatures so you need to be able to do that at some level. A year or two of SOC experience is a good way to start.
Detection Syntax -- You have to be able to express detection logic. Suricata for network traffic, Sigma for logs, YARA for files. Learn those and you can detect a lot of evil. They translate well to vendor-specific stuff.
Read 8 tweets
Chris Sanders 🍯 Profile picture
24 Jun
This relates to my 4th and 5th reasons why these decisions happen -- AV company tactics and giving folks what they need to tune rules. That actually means GIVING analysts the rule logic. I could go on and on about this.
Most companies don't want to give out their rule logic because they see it as a sensitive trade secret. This is nonsense. A rule set isn't a detection companies most valuable intellectual property, it's their processes for creating those rules and the staff that do the work.
Limiting access to detection logic makes it harder for your customer. It is MUCH more difficult to investigate alerts when you don't know what they are actually detecting and how they're doing it.
Read 9 tweets
Chris Sanders 🍯 Profile picture
24 Jun
I usually see two things.

1. Analysts don't have the skills to perform tuning.

2. Management won't prioritize time for it or train analysts to do it.

I rarely see #2 get rectified until new management comes in who understands the importance of tuning.
I've seen many good analysts give clear, compelling explanations as to why tuning is important but fail to convince the decision-makers that this needs a dedicated person or a day a week from an existing person.
The thing that needs to become more commonly accepted is that if you decide your company needs a SOC, then that has to include a detection tuning capability. It also needs to be run by people who've seen this thing work well.
Read 5 tweets
Chris Sanders 🍯 Profile picture
24 Jun
There's often interesting public discussion about vendor detection tools and what they detect vs expectations. There's some interesting decision making that happens behind the scenes at these vendors when it comes to how they manage detection signatures. A thread... 1/
At a vendor, when you build a detection ruleset for lots of customers, you have to approach things a bit uniquely because you don't control the network where these rules are deployed and can't tune them yourself. 2/
One facet of this challenge is a decision regarding how you prioritize rule efficacy...we're talking accuracy/precision and the number of false positives that analysts have to investigate and tune. 3/
Read 18 tweets
Chris Sanders 🍯 Profile picture
22 Jun
I'm really excited to share that our newest online class, Detection Engineering with Sigma, is open this morning. You can learn more and register at learnsigmarules.com.

The course is discounted for launch until next Friday. Image
If you're not familiar with @sigma_hq, you should be! It's the open standard detection signature format for logs. Said another way, Sigma is for logs what Snort/Suricata are for network traffic and YARA is for files.
Perhaps the best thing about Sigma is that you can easily convert its rules into LOTS of other formats using the Sigmac tool. Things like Elastic, Splunk, Graylog, NetWitness, Carbon Black, and so on. Image
Read 11 tweets
Chris Sanders 🍯 Profile picture
10 Jun
One of the unique challenges of forensic analysis is that we're focused both on determining what events happened and the disposition of those events (benign or malicious). A failure to do one well can lead to mistakes with the other. 1/
Generally speaking, analysts interpret evidence to look for cues that spawn more investigative actions. Those cues can be relational (indicate the presence of related events), dispositional (indicate the malicious or benign nature of something), or even both at the same time. 2/
Not only do we have to explore relationships, but we also have to characterize and conceptualize them. That means we're constantly switching between cause/effect analysis and pattern matching of a variety of sorts. 3/
Read 11 tweets

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