DIGITAL DEFENSE SYSTEM VOL 4: Detection, Threat Hunting & Forensics

Vol IV teaches you to actually use the logs Vol III taught you to collect. Detection engineering, endpoint and network forensics, threat hunting workflows, deception, and personal-scale malware triage the move from passive defense to active investigation.

Most personal security stops at prevention. Practitioners who actually catch things go further: they hunt, they triage, they investigate. Vol IV is the working catalog for that move without needing an enterprise SOC behind you. You'll write Sigma and YARA detections that catch real attacker behavior. You'll learn osquery and Velociraptor for endpoint visibility, Zeek and Suricata for network monitoring, and Plaso for the timelines that turn a confused incident into a clear story.

You'll set up Thinkst canary tokens that alert the moment something stumbles into them. You'll triage suspicious files with VirusTotal, Hybrid Analysis, and CyberChef without endangering your own systems. And you'll close the loop with Volatility for memory forensics and Ghidra for the binaries that warrant a deeper look.

Vol IV also brings discipline to what's usually ad-hoc: hunting workflows, IOC aging policies, after action reviews, and a personal knowledge base that compounds across investigations. By the end, you'll have a personal detection program most small businesses would envy and you will have, at least once, caught something that would otherwise have run quietly in the background.

INSIDE THIS VOLUME : Detection engineering with Sigma, YARA, and detection-as-code • Endpoint forensics: osquery, Velociraptor, Sysmon, Plaso, KAPE • Network forensics: Zeek, Suricata, Wireshark, NetFlow, JA4 • Threat hunting workflows (hypothesis-, IOC-, and TTP-driven) • Honeypots & deception: canary tokens, Thinkst Canary, decoy accounts • Malware triage with VirusTotal, Hybrid Analysis, any.run, CyberChef • Memory & live-system analysis with Volatility, WinPmem, LiME • Threat intelligence integration (MISP, OTX, abuse.ch, CISA KEV) • Reverse engineering foundations: Ghidra, Cutter, dnSpy • Reporting templates and after-action discipline.

BEST FOR: Readers who've hardened their stack and now want to see what's actually happening on it IT pros, security-curious developers, small-business defenders, and serious practitioners.

FORMAT 13: page illustrated PDF with 39 clickable references to canonical sources.