What is Detection Engineering?

Detection engineering is the discipline of designing, building, and maintaining detection rules that identify malicious activity in your environment. It sits at the intersection of threat intelligence, security operations, and software engineering.

The Role of a Detection Engineer

Detection engineers are responsible for:

Translating Threats into Detections: Taking threat intelligence and turning it into actionable detection rules

Reducing Alert Fatigue: Tuning rules to minimize false positives while catching real threats

Scaling Detection Capabilities: Building systems that can detect threats across large, diverse environments

Enabling Response: Creating detections that provide enough context for analysts to investigate

Why Detection Engineering Matters

Traditional security operations relied on pre-built vendor rules and signatures. This approach has serious limitations:

Vendor rules are generic - They can't account for your specific environment

Attackers evolve faster - By the time a vendor creates a rule, attackers have moved on

Context is lost - Generic rules don't understand your business

Too many alerts - Without tuning, teams drown in noise

Detection engineering flips this model. Instead of relying on vendors, organizations build custom detections tailored to their environment, threat model, and risk tolerance.

The Detection Engineering Lifecycle

Threat Intelligence → Understand what attackers are doing

Detection Design → Create logic to identify malicious behavior

Development → Write and test the detection rule

Deployment → Push to production SIEM/EDR

Monitoring → Track performance and effectiveness

Tuning → Reduce false positives, increase coverage

Retirement → Remove outdated detections

How AI Changes Everything

AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming detection engineering:

Faster Rule Creation: Generate detection logic in seconds instead of hours

Better Explanations: Understand complex rules with AI-powered analysis

Automated Testing: Generate test cases to validate your detections

Continuous Improvement: Use AI to identify tuning opportunities

Throughout this course, you'll learn to leverage AI as your detection engineering copilot.