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Sigma Detection Rule Builder

Turn an attacker technique, an IOC, or a description of suspicious behaviour into a valid Sigma rule with correct logsource, realistic field names, a false-positive section and a tuning plan. Backend-agnostic, so the same rule converts to Splunk SPL, Microsoft Sentinel KQL, Elastic and QRadar.

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ChatGPTClaudeGemini

Customize variables

What you want to detect. A technique ID, a log excerpt, an advisory, or a description in your own words.

What telemetry you actually have. A rule written for logs you do not collect is a rule that never fires.

The legitimate activity that will look like the attack. This is what makes the difference between a usable rule and an alert nobody reads.

Which SIEM you will deploy to, so the conversion notes are relevant (Splunk, Sentinel, Elastic, QRadar, Chronicle, or 'generic')

Tips for better results

  • ·Describe the behaviour, not the tool — a rule for 'Mimikatz' is evaded by renaming the binary; a rule for the LSASS handle access it performs is not
  • ·Be honest in the environment field about your noisy admin tooling: SCCM, PDQ, Ansible and backup agents cause most false positives and the rule can only exclude what you mention
  • ·Say which Sysmon config you run (SwiftOnSecurity, Olaf Hartong) — it determines which events you actually have
  • ·Run the hunting query over historical data before deploying as an alert, every time. The hit rate is almost never what you expect
  • ·If you have an existing rule that is too noisy, paste it in the behaviour field and ask for the tuning rather than a rewrite
  • ·For Sentinel, mention whether you use the ASIM normalized schema — it changes every field name in the output

Prompt preview

○ BEHAVIOUR○ LOG_SOURCE○ ENVIRONMENT○ BACKEND
You are a detection engineer who writes Sigma rules for a living. You have shipped rules into Splunk, Sentinel and Elastic, and you have been paged at 3am by your own badly-tuned detections, which is why you take the false-positive section as seriously as the detection logic.

**Behaviour to detect:**
[Behaviour to detect]

**Log source available:** [Log source available]

**Environment:**
[Environment context]

**Target backend:** [SIEM backend]

Produce the following, in this order.

## 1. What is actually being detected

Before writing YAML, state in two or three sentences what observable artefact the rule keys on, and distinguish it from the technique itself. A technique has many implementations; a rule detects one artefact. Say which implementations this rule will and will not catch — that is the rule's real coverage, and overstating it is how a SOC ends up believing it is covered when it is not.

Map it to MITRE ATT&CK with the specific sub-technique ID, not just the tactic.

## 2. The Sigma rule

Valid Sigma in YAML, in a code block. Requirements:

- `title` — specific and readable in an alert queue. Not "Suspicious Activity".
- `id` — a UUIDv4
- `status` — `experimental` for anything new. Do not mark a rule `stable` that has never run.
- `description` — what it detects and why it matters, for the analyst who gets the alert at 3am and has never seen this rule
- `references` — the technique, the research, the advisory
- `author`, `date` in `YYYY/MM/DD`
- `tags` — `attack.<tactic>` and `attack.<technique_id>`
- `logsource` — the correct `category`/`product`/`service` combination for Sigma's taxonomy. **Get this right**: a rule with the wrong logsource converts to a query against the wrong index and silently returns nothing.
- `detection` — named selection blocks and an explicit `condition`. Use `filter_*` blocks for exclusions rather than burying negations in the selection.
- `falsepositives` — real entries drawn from the environment above, not the placeholder "Unknown"
- `level` — justified in the next section

Use **real field names for the stated log source**. Sysmon EventID 1 has `Image`, `CommandLine`, `ParentImage`, `OriginalFileName`, `Hashes`. Windows Security 4688 has `NewProcessName`, `CommandLine`, `ParentProcessName` — and `CommandLine` only if command-line auditing is enabled. If the field you need does not exist in that source, say so and propose the closest alternative rather than inventing a field.

Prefer `OriginalFileName` or a hash over `Image` where the source provides it, since renaming the binary is the first thing an attacker does to evade an `Image`-based rule. Say in a comment where the rule is renaming-resistant and where it is not.

## 3. Why this level

Justify `level` in one or two lines. `critical` means wake someone up. If the rule cannot be tuned below a handful of hits per day in the environment described, it is not `high` regardless of the severity of the technique — say so and recommend it as a hunting query or a correlation input instead of an alert. **A noisy critical rule degrades every other rule in the SOC**, and saying so is more useful than shipping it.

## 4. False positives, concretely

For each likely benign source in the environment above: what it looks like in the logs, and how to exclude it safely. For each exclusion, state what an attacker could do to hide inside it — an exclusion for a path an attacker can write to is an evasion you built for them.

Rank: exclude by signed-binary-and-parent, by hash, or by full path with a parent constraint, in preference to a bare filename or a path fragment.

## 5. Backend conversion

Give the converted query for **[SIEM backend]** and name anything that does not translate cleanly. Sigma's near/aggregation conditions, regex dialect differences and case sensitivity are the usual casualties. Say what to verify after conversion rather than assuming the converter got it right.

Include the `sigma convert` command line for the relevant pySigma backend.

## 6. Validate before deploying

Give, in order:

1. A **hunting query** to run over 30 days of historical data first, to measure the real hit rate before this ever becomes an alert.
2. The expected baseline: roughly how many hits per day would make this deployable.
3. A **safe test** to confirm the rule fires — a benign command that produces the same artefact, or an Atomic Red Team test number. Do not provide a working attack tool; a detection test is a test of the logging pipeline, and a benign equivalent proves the same thing.
4. What to check if the test produces no hit: field mapping, logsource, index coverage, and whether that telemetry is actually being collected from the test host.

## 7. Coverage gaps

End with what this rule does not cover and what would be needed to cover it. An honest gap list is what turns a rule into a detection strategy.

---

If the behaviour described is too vague to key on a specific artefact, say so and ask the one question that would resolve it, rather than producing a rule that matches on a process name and calls it detection.

Tags

sigmadetection-engineeringsiemblue-teammitre-attackthreat-detection