Introduction
Setting up a SIEM sounds simple until you have to prove that it is actually seeing what you think it is seeing. For this project, I added Wazuh and Sysmon monitoring to an Atomic Red Team workstation, then used safe attack simulations to trace activity from the Windows endpoint into the SIEM.
Two of my experiments produced clear, matching evidence in Sysmon and Wazuh. A third showed something equally useful: Sysmon recorded the activity locally, but I could not find a matching Wazuh alert. That gap taught me that installing a logging tool is only the beginning. Detection coverage has to be tested, not assumed.
My name is Christopher Bontempi, and I am transitioning into cybersecurity because I enjoy problem-solving, continuous learning, and figuring out how systems fit together. This is my first contribution to the cybersecurity community. I hope it helps another beginner see how a collection of logs can become a useful story about what happened on a system.
Setup
