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SANS SEC555 Detection Engineering course social art.
Photo: SANS Institute, SEC555 Detection Engineering and SIEM Analytics course art, companion to the Detection Engineering poster.

Detection

Did You Know: Detection Rules Are Not Finished When They Reach Production

SANS Institute's Detection Engineering poster frames detections as living assets. A rule that ships without requirements triage, testing, and ongoing monitoring can turn noisy, stale, or ineffective as environments and attacker behavior change.

Ava Okello, DetectionLondon3 min read

BETHESDA - The SANS Institute published its Detection Engineering: From Logs to Alerts poster in February 2026 and expanded on it in a March 5, 2026 blog post. The poster, created by Kathryn Hedley and Nick Mitropoulos for SEC555: Detection Engineering and SIEM Analytics, is intentionally tool-agnostic. It teaches how detection engineering works across commercial SIEMs, open source stacks, and cloud native services rather than how to configure a single product.

SANS Institute brand mark and blog abstract imagery on a desk panel.
Photo: SANS Institute, public brand and blog imagery for the Detection Engineering poster coverage.

At the center is a six-phase Detection Engineering Life Cycle: requirements discovery, triage, investigation, development, testing, and deployment. SANS stresses that detections are not one-time creations. A rule written and deployed without follow-up will eventually become noisy, stale, or ineffective as environments and attacker behavior change. Requirements can come from SOC alerting gaps, threat hunting, threat intelligence, incident response, or penetration testing. Triage then decides which ideas deserve build effort based on severity, relevance, attacker activity, and maintenance cost.

SANS Institute blog abstract artwork.
Photo: SANS Institute, public blog abstract artwork.

The poster also ties detection quality to upstream data readiness. Process creation Event ID 4688, for example, is only useful if command-line logging is enabled through Group Policy. Without that field, critical execution detail never reaches the SIEM. Collection choices (agent based, agentless, API driven, or cloud native), aggregation, enrichment, and SIEM architecture (event rates, storage, retention, scalability) shape what analysts can detect and how quickly they can investigate.

SOCtember diagram of the six-phase Detection Engineering Life Cycle.
Illustration: SOCtember, six-phase Detection Engineering Life Cycle from requirements discovery to deployment, paraphrased from the SANS poster.

For SOC detection desks, the practical takeaway is process ownership after merge. Label detections clearly, monitor them in production, and use metrics to tune, update, or retire rules. Blend behavioral, statistical, and static techniques rather than relying on one method. Shipping a rule is the midpoint of the life cycle, not the finish line.

SOCtember diagram of a collect, enrich, detect, operate pipeline with the Event ID 4688 command-line logging example.
Illustration: SOCtember, data readiness to trusted alerts, with the SANS Event ID 4688 command-line logging example.

Sources:


Ava Okello covers detection engineering and SOC analytics for SOCtember from London.

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