A curated GPL-3.0 repository collecting open-source hunting tools, Sysmon/ELK pipelines, and MITRE ATT&CK-aligned resources for defenders running authorized hunts.
| Tool | A3sal0n/CyberThreatHunting — curated collection of threat hunting tools, scripts, and reading resources |
| Category | Defensive resource collection / threat hunting reference |
| Primary Use | Assembling an authorized hunting stack around Sysmon, osquery, Velociraptor, and ELK, plus study material for hunting programs |
| Safe Use | Purely defensive: supports threat hunting, DFIR, and detection engineering on systems you are authorized to monitor and investigate |
| Telemetry Note | Not an execution tool itself; it catalogs telemetry generators (Sysmon, ETW, osquery) that defenders use to observe adversary behavior in logs |
A3sal0n/CyberThreatHunting is not a scanner or an exploit framework — it is a curated reference library, roughly 919 stars strong, that maps the defensive tooling landscape a threat hunter actually needs. The repository is written in Python as its listed language, licensed under GPL-3.0, and tagged with cybersecurity, dfir, incident-response, threat-hunting, and threat-intelligence. Its README is organized into five clean sections: Hunting Tools, Resources, Hunting with AI, Must Read, and Custom Scripts, the last pointing into a tools/README.md with the maintainers' own utilities. That structure alone tells you the audience: professionals assembling a hunting capability rather than looking for a single silver-bullet product.
The Hunting Tools section is effectively a stack blueprint. It leads with Velociraptor, the endpoint visibility and incident response platform, alongside Facebook's osquery and Google's GRR Rapid Response — three open-source agents that collectively cover endpoint querying at scale. What is notable is how deliberately the list pairs collection agents with the telemetry they generate and the backend that stores it: Elasticsearch/ELK for logging, searching, and visualization, and Graylog paired with Sysmon for Windows endpoint events.
The Sysmon emphasis is the connective tissue of the whole collection. The README links the classic cyberwardog walkthrough for building a Sysmon dashboard on an ELK stack, and it surfaces ion-storm's advanced sysmon-config — a configuration, installer, and auto-updater for high-quality event tracing — together with matching Graylog threat detection configurations. For a hunter standing up a lab or hardening an authorized monitoring deployment, these two links alone condense weeks of configuration research into a repeatable pipeline: Sysmon on the endpoint, Graylog or ELK behind it.
The tooling list then moves into acquisition and triage. CyLR from orlikoski handles live response collection; uac, the Unix-like Artifacts Collector, covers the non-Windows side; and KAPE (Kroll Artifact Parser And Extractor) provides industrial-grade artifact parsing. Two rapid-triage utilities close the loop: chainsaw from WithSecureLabs for searching Windows forensic artefacts quickly, and evtx-hunter from NVISOsecurity, a Python tool that generates a web report of interesting activity inside EVTX files. This progression — collect, parse, search, report — reads like a condensed DFIR workflow rather than a random link dump.
The Resources section anchors everything to methodology. MITRE ATT&CK provides the behavioral model of adversary lifecycle phases, and MITRE CAR supplies analytics built on that model — the pairing that most mature hunting programs use to convert intelligence into detection logic. Alongside these sit ThreatHuntingProject/ThreatHunting curated by David Bianco and the ThreatHunter-Playbook, which operationalizes hunting with Sysmon and Windows Event logs. There are also technique-level resources: JPCERT's research on detecting lateral movement through event log tracking, and a Countercept piece on endpoint detection of remote service creation and PsExec using ETW.
What emerges across the resources is a clear bias toward lateral movement hunting, which is telling about the collection's maturity. Beaconing detection via Sqrrl-era techniques, Bro IDS-based hunting against network telemetry, and Loki scanner automation with Splunk are all represented. A hunter reading this list can trace the historical arc of the discipline — from Sqrrl's hypothesis-driven hunting framework through to modern ELK-based platform building guides — and see how tooling conventions consolidated around a small set of agents, log pipelines, and behavioral models.
The Hunting with AI section is the most time-stamped part of the repository, collecting articles on using ChatGPT for threat hunting, CTI workflows, and DevSecOps prompt guides. It is less about operational tooling and more about prompt literacy for analysts — worth noting that these are third-party blog posts rather than maintained code, so treat them as reading material, not dependencies. For a team evaluating where large language models genuinely help hypothesis generation versus where they produce plausible noise, the links offer a starting survey of the 2023-era discourse.
The Must Read section is where the collection earns its keep for anyone building a program rather than a single hunt. The SANS papers on threat hunting fundamentals, Rob Lee-era definitions of the discipline, and sqrrl's whitepaper on a framework for cyber threat hunting give the doctrinal backbone. The Hunting Maturity Model link is particularly practical: it lets a team place itself on a five-level scale and pick the next capability increment, which is exactly how the rest of the repository should be consumed — incrementally, against a maturity target.
Operationally, the safest way to use CyberThreatHunting is as a procurement and lab-building checklist inside an authorized environment. Deploy Velociraptor or osquery on hosts you own or are contracted to monitor, ship Sysmon and Windows Event logs into ELK or Graylog, validate with chainsaw and evtx-hunter against test EVTX corpora, and map every hypothesis back to ATT&CK techniques before it becomes a production analytic. The repository is descriptive, not prescriptive, so the engineering discipline has to come from you.
From a defender's observability standpoint, the repository catalogs the tools that generate the telemetry defenders rely on, not anything adversarial. Sysmon and ETW produce the event streams; osquery and Velociraptor leave agent footprints any blue team should inventory in its own environment; CyLR and uac write collection artifacts during live response. Knowing these signatures matters in both directions — for running your own hunting stack cleanly and for recognizing when similar tooling appears unexpectedly on your estate.
Caveats worth flagging: like all curated lists, some links will rot — several point to 2015–2018 blog posts and defunct products like Sqrrl — and the Hunting with AI material predates current model capabilities. Verify each referenced tool against its upstream repository before deployment, and prefer the maintained projects (Velociraptor, osquery, chainsaw) over archived ones. Used with that filter, A3sal0n/CyberThreatHunting remains a genuinely useful orientation map for defenders building or refreshing an authorized threat hunting capability.
A3sal0n/CyberThreatHunting.Educational analysis for authorized security professionals. Use only in controlled, authorized environments.
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