Sigma-Hunter: A Domain-Specific Language Model for Threat Hunting and Detection Engineering

Abstract

Detection engineers must translate threat reports, forensic observations, and hunt hypotheses into precise, testable rules. General-purpose large language models (LLMs) can draft such rules, but often produce invalid YAML, incorrect log sources, unsupported fields, or overly broad detection logic. This paper presents \emph{Sigma-Hunter}, a domain-adapted LLM for analyst-assistive Sigma rule generation and threat hunting. We build an instruction-tuning dataset from 3,635 validated open-source Sigma rules, expanded into 7,663 question-answer and analyst-reasoning examples. Each source rule is assigned to a single train, validation, or test partition before this expansion, so no rule leaks across splits. We fine-tune a 7B Mistral model and a Phi-4 model with LoRA and score held-out rule generations on syntax, approximate field consistency, and a semantic judgment of detection logic, completeness, selectivity, and log-source alignment. Sigma-Hunter-Mistral scores 8.17 overall, against 7.88 for the strongest general-purpose baseline and 4.61 for untuned Mistral. Two findings stand out: domain adaptation enables a compact 7B model to perform competitively with larger general-purpose models on this structured task, and syntactic validity is a weak proxy for semantic rule quality, as several baselines emit well-formed YAML carrying weak detection logic. The adapted models run locally, which suits detection engineering in disconnected environments where analysts cannot reach hosted model services.