Open-Source SOC Stack with Wazuh, Suricata, Zeek, TheHive

Enterprise SIEM and EDR solutions cost serious money. For many mid-market teams, the licensing fees are simply out of reach. But needing deep visibility into what’s happening on your network doesn’t change just because your budget is tight.

This Open-Source SOC Stack is built for organizations with strong engineering talent but limited licensing budgets. It combines Wazuh for endpoint security, Suricata for threat detection, Zeek for network analysis, and TheHive for incident management. When you have the operational discipline to run it properly, this stack rivals commercial tools in what it can detect.

Why This Matters

This isn’t plug-and-play. Building an open-source SOC actually forces your team to understand what’s happening. You can’t just trust a vendor to tell you the answer. You own everything from endpoint agent to case dashboard, so you learn exactly why rules fire, how logs get parsed, and what context matters for investigating alerts. That’s not a weakness—it’s a strength.

How It All Fits Together

The stack is modular. Each piece handles a specific job: collect, analyze, detect, and respond. Here’s what each component does:

Component	What It Does	How It Works
Wazuh Agent & Manager	Endpoint Security (HIDS/EDR)	Collects OS logs and watches for suspicious changes to critical files. Sends normalized alerts downstream.
Suricata	Network Threat Detection (NIDS)	Inspects network traffic looking for known attack signatures (Emerging Threats ruleset, etc.). Alerts when it finds something.
Zeek	Network Visibility (NDR)	Records protocol-level details: DNS queries, HTTP traffic, TLS certificates. Perfect for hunting and understanding what’s really happening on the wire.
Log Pipeline (Logstash/Filebeat)	Data Collection & Routing	Gathers logs from all sources, enriches them, and sends everything to the central index (Elasticsearch or OpenSearch).
Wazuh Dashboard	Alert Center	Where analysts see alerts, search Zeek metadata, and dig into endpoint details.
TheHive	Case Management	Takes critical alerts and turns them into formal incident cases. Analysts track investigations, add evidence, and document what they did.
Cortex / Shuffle (Optional)	Automation	Looks up indicators against VirusTotal and GreyNoise, and can automatically trigger response actions from TheHive.

What You Can Actually Detect

This stack covers the areas that matter most:

• Endpoint Threats — Catch suspicious PowerShell scripts, unauthorized scheduled tasks, and privilege escalation attempts using Wazuh.

• Network-Level Attacks — Suricata spots known malware C2 traffic, credentials transmitted in the clear, and known vulnerability exploits crossing the network.

• Hunting & Investigation — Use Zeek’s DNS logs to spot domain generation algorithms (DGA), or SSL logs to find self-signed certificates that attackers use.

• File Changes — Watch critical system files (/etc/passwd, /etc/shadow) and web directories for unauthorized modifications, which often means a web shell was planted.

• Compliance — Centralized, auditable logs that satisfy ISO/IEC 27001 and CIS Benchmarks requirements.

How Alerts Become Cases

A tool without a process is just noise. This stack enforces a real workflow:

1. Detection — Suricata catches an HTTP POST that matches a known malware signature.

2. Alert Created — The alert shows up in your Wazuh dashboard and Elasticsearch.

3. Escalation — An automated rule sees the severity is “High” and sends it to TheHive via webhook.

4. Case Started — TheHive opens a new incident, loads an “Infected Host” template with standard investigation steps.

5. Analysis — The analyst jumps to Wazuh, uses Zeek data to confirm which network connection it was, and checks endpoint logs to see which process (like svchost.exe) initiated it.

6. Response & Close — The analyst uses Wazuh to isolate the machine, documents everything in TheHive, and closes the case.

The Operational Trade-offs

Let’s be honest: this stack isn’t all sunshine.

• Initial Tuning — Out of the box, Suricata and Wazuh generate a lot of noise. The first 30 days involve a serious effort to whitelist legitimate scanners, understand what normal looks like, and kill false positives. This isn’t optional.

• Storage — Zeek network metadata and detailed logs eat disk space fast. You need proper index lifecycle management (ILM) to move old data to cold storage and eventually delete it, or your cluster will crash.

What You Get

Beyond just deployed software:

• Architecture Design — Network diagrams, port mappings, and a real breakdown of compute/storage requirements.

• Infrastructure as Code — Ansible playbooks or Docker Compose files so you can redeploy consistently, not by hand.

• Tuned Detection Rules — A documented list of rules that actually work, mapped to MITRE ATT&CK framework.

• TheHive Templates — Ready-made playbooks for common incidents: Phishing, Malware, Unauthorized Access.

• SOC Training — Practical guides on how to pivot between Zeek network data and Wazuh endpoint details during investigation.

60-Day Implementation Timeline

• Days 1–15: Infrastructure Setup — Provision compute, deploy Wazuh (Manager, Indexer, Dashboard), configure Filebeat and Logstash pipelines.

• Days 16–30: Deploy Sensors — Get Wazuh agents on critical servers. Deploy Suricata and Zeek on network monitoring ports. Connect alert webhooks to TheHive.

• Days 31–45: Tuning Phase — Analyze baseline traffic. Kill the initial flood of false positives. Tune Wazuh file monitoring and Suricata rules for your environment.

• Days 46–60: Validation & Handoff — Finalize TheHive templates. Run a simulated incident to test detection through case closure. Hand off to your operations team.

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This open-source stack is not a compromise. It’s a fully capable defensive platform. Yes, it demands engineering skill and operational discipline. But organizations that commit to it get deep visibility, structured incident response, and complete control over their security data.