🛡️ Cybersecurity20 min
Threat Hunting at Scale: Building an Open-Source SIEM Pipeline
A
Muhammad Asim Chattha
Software Developer & Cybersecurity Researcher
#SIEM#Threat Hunting#Elasticsearch#Sigma Rules#SOC
Building an in-house Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system gives you complete control over your detection engineering pipeline.
Pipeline Architecture
- **Log Ingestion**: Filebeat agents with Kafka for high-throughput buffering and backpressure handling
- **Processing**: Logstash pipelines for parsing (grok, dissect), enrichment (GeoIP, threat intel), and normalization (ECS schema)
- **Storage**: Elasticsearch cluster tuned for security workloads with ILM policies and rollover indices
- **Detection**: Sigma rule engine converting rules to Elasticsearch queries with scheduled batch jobs
- **Visualization**: Kibana dashboards for SOC analysts including MITRE ATT&CK heatmaps and timeline analysis
- **Alerting**: ElastAlert2 with webhook integration to SOAR platforms for automated response
Includes production-ready Docker Compose stack, Terraform for cloud deployment, and performance benchmarks at 10K+ EPS.