DIY security operations centre pipeline catches real attackers within minutes

A home-built security pipeline leveraging open-source tools has demonstrated how rapid detection and automation can turn decoys into active defenders, capturing real threats just minutes after deployment.

A cybersecurity engineer has described how a home-built security operations centre pipeline began catching real attackers within minutes of going live, using a honeypot, a SIEM, automation software and an incident response platform to turn raw intrusion attempts into structured cases with almost no human intervention.

The system places OpenCanary at the front line, presenting fake SSH, FTP, HTTP and Telnet services to the internet while the genuine SSH service is shifted to another port. That simple swap means scanners and opportunistic attackers are more likely to strike the decoy first, giving the defender a stream of high-confidence telemetry rather than noisy, ambiguous alerts.

From there, Wazuh handles detection, with custom rules classifying any interaction with the honeypot as malicious and elevating SSH brute-force activity to the highest severity. The write-up says the first real login attempt arrived within three minutes of deployment, followed by a flood of further probes from around the world, including repeated use of weak passwords commonly seen in automated attacks.

The next layer is Shuffle, which receives Wazuh alerts through a webhook and pushes them into TheHive as structured incidents. According to separate deployment guides for Shuffle, Wazuh and TheHive, this kind of SOAR-to-SIEM-to-case-management workflow is increasingly used to reduce manual triage and keep pace with alert volume, especially when teams want to automate enrichment, routing and notification.

TheHive then becomes the analyst workspace, preserving the context needed to investigate each event: source IP, attempted username, password and timestamp. Other open-source implementations of the same stack also show how teams commonly add threat-intelligence lookups from services such as VirusTotal and AbuseIPDB, plus email or chat notifications, to shorten response time and improve situational awareness.

What makes the project notable is not just the tooling, but the speed at which the internet reacted once the honeypot was exposed. The creator argues that the experience underlined a simple lesson: defenders learn faster by building than by reading alone, and modern SOC design depends as much on architecture and automation as on detection rules.

The project’s code and configuration are published publicly, and the author says the next steps include IP enrichment, automatic blocking and additional reporting. For anyone studying cybersecurity, the broader message is clear: a working detection pipeline is not a theoretical exercise, but a live system that can be built, tested and improved against real-world activity.

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Source: Fuse Wire Services