Blue Team Handbook: SOC, SIEM, and Threat Hunting: Practical Techniques for Security Operations and Threat Hunting Teams

As cyberthreats become more sophisticated and alert volumes rise, security teams need more than just tools—they need strategy, structure, and field-tested guidance. Following the success of the original edition, this updated edition of Blue Team Handbook: SOC, SIEM, and Threat Hunting is still the essential resource for building, optimizing, and managing modern detection engineering practices and security operations centers.

This practical guide distills over 20 years of frontline cybersecurity experience into an actionable playbook for analysts, SOC managers, architects, detection engineers, and threat hunters. Author Don Murdoch delivers expert insights designed to help teams improve quickly. Whether you’re refining your current operations or launching a SOC from scratch, this book empowers you with proven, real-world techniques to defend against today’s most persistent threats.

• Build and organize SOC teams for maximum operational impact
• Understand how to launch and execute a comprehensive telemetry, audit data, and SIEM deployment strategy
• Create effective SOC use cases
• Develop and apply meaningful metrics to evaluate SOC effectiveness, analyst performance, and SIEM utility
• Identify advanced threats using real-world threat hunting techniques