engineering-detections

A guide to creating and improving security detection rules for logs, network traffic, files, and endpoint activity. It covers formats such as Sigma and YARA and maps detections to MITRE ATT&CK, a catalog of attacker techniques.

In plain words
What is it for?
Writing, reviewing, testing, and tuning SIEM, EDR, Sigma, YARA, and Suricata detections; measuring coverage; and managing detection rules as code.
Why use it?
It helps turn suspicious behavior or threat intelligence into alerts while checking that rules catch the intended activity without creating excessive false alarms.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/evilfreelancer/secs/engineering-detections
Any agent
npx skills add EvilFreelancer/secs --skill engineering-detections
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/EvilFreelancer/secs

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 77 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,177 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00077 $0.03177
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.01588
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00635
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00318

Measured 2d ago against content hash c533bb8c20ad, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engineering-detections scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -sL "https://defuddle.md/<url>" # scheme in the path is optional
Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to engineering-detections — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.agents/skills/engineering-detections/SKILL.md · 316 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 316 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Engineering Detections

A detection is a hypothesis about attacker behaviour, expressed as a query, that a human will be paged for. Two properties decide whether it is worth deploying: does it fire on the behaviour, and does it stay quiet otherwise. Most rules fail the second test, and the cost is paid by whoever is on call.

When to Use

  • Writing a new detection rule from a TTP, a sample, or an incident
  • Reviewing or tuning an existing rule that is noisy or silent
  • Converting threat intelligence into deployable detection content
  • Assessing detection coverage against ATT&CK
  • Setting up detection-as-code: repo layout, testing, CI, deployment

When NOT to Use

  • Searching for an unknown compromise right now — use hunting-threats
  • Working an active incident — use responding-to-incidents
  • Analyzing the sample the detection is for — use analyzing-malware
  • Authoring a file/memory signature — use writing-yara-rules; a log/SIEM rule — use writing-sigma-rules
  • Preventive controls and hardening — hardening is not detection; a rule is not a substitute for closing the path

Route to a Depth Skill

Focus Skill
Authoring a portable Sigma rule specifically — field taxonomy, modifiers, backend conversion, SigmaHQ standards writing-sigma-rules

This skill covers the whole detection lifecycle across Sigma, YARA, and Suricata; reach for writing-sigma-rules when the task is the Sigma rule itself and its conversion to a target SIEM.

Detect Behaviour, Not Artifacts

Rank what you write by how expensive it is for the adversary to change:

Hash              trivial to change      → block, don't alert
IP / domain       days                   → block + low-severity alert
Filename / path   trivial                → weak signal, combine only
Tooling artifact  weeks (recompile)      → good, decays
Behaviour / TTP   expensive              → this is the target

The pyramid-of-pain reasoning is the whole discipline: a rule on mimikatz.exe is worthless; a rule on a process opening a handle to LSASS with PROCESS_VM_READ catches every tool that does the same thing.

Read the full file on GitHub · 316 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 316 lines · 77 tokens per session scan A c533bb8c20ad

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engineering-detections is a skill published in the GitHub repository EvilFreelancer/secs (10 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 77 tokens to every session and 3,177 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). It is 100% identical to engineering-detections, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

Blue Team Defense & Hardening

System hardening, detection engineering, security baseline monitoring, patch management, defense-in-depth architecture, and security posture improvement.

Masriyan/Claude-Code-CyberSecurity-Skill · 30 tokens

analyzing-email-headers-for-phishing-investigation

Parse and analyze email headers to trace the origin of phishing emails, verify sender authenticity, and identify spoofing through SPF, DKIM, and DMARC validation.

26zl/cybersec-toolkit · 44 tokens

analyzing-golang-malware-with-ghidra

Reverse engineer Go-compiled malware using Ghidra with specialized scripts for function recovery, string extraction, and type reconstruction in stripped Go binaries.

26zl/cybersec-toolkit · 40 tokens

analyzing-prefetch-files-for-execution-history

Parse Windows Prefetch files to determine program execution history including run counts, timestamps, and referenced files for forensic investigation.

26zl/cybersec-toolkit · 34 tokens

analyzing-ios-app-security-with-objection

Performs runtime mobile security exploration of iOS applications using Objection, a Frida-powered toolkit that enables security testers to interact with app internals without jailbreaking. Use when assessing iOS app security posture, bypassing client-side protections, dumping keychain items, inspecting filesystem…

26zl/cybersec-toolkit · 99 tokens

add-tool

Use when adding a new cybersecurity tool to this installer. Walks through editing the right module file, adding to toolsconfig.json, running validators, and syncing MCP server data if needed. Triggers on phrases like "add tool", "add ", "register a new tool", "include X in the installer".

26zl/cybersec-toolkit · 68 tokens