Cyber threats are no longer limited to large enterprises - small and medium businesses are increasingly targeted due to limited detection capabilities and constrained security budgets. Traditional preventive controls alone are insufficient against modern attack techniques, requiring organizations to adopt continuous detection, vulnerability visibility, and security posture monitoring.

This advanced session explores how Wazuh, an open-source SIEM and XDR platform, enables deep threat detection, vulnerability intelligence, and Linux hardening governance across enterprise environments - while also automating large parts of the response lifecycle by default.

Through practical attack simulations, attendees will observe how adversarial techniques such as SSH brute force campaigns, privilege escalation, and unauthorized configuration changes are detected, correlated, and contextualized within a centralized detection platform. The session will demonstrate how detection signals evolve into actionable security events that can trigger automated containment workflows.

Expanding beyond active attacks, the talk will examine Wazuh’s vulnerability detection engine, showing how CVE exposure, outdated packages, and patch gaps are continuously identified and operationalized into remediation prioritization strategies.

Key areas covered include:
- Behavioral threat detection across Linux workloads
- Privilege escalation and insider activity monitoring
- File Integrity Monitoring of critical system assets
- Vulnerability detection leveraging CVE intelligence feeds
- Patch exposure visibility and remediation prioritization
- CIS benchmark compliance and hardening validation
- Configuration drift detection and risk scoring
- MITRE ATT&CK mapping and threat context enrichment
- Built-in automated response and containment strategies

By the end of this session, participants will gain advanced insight into building detection-driven security operations using open-source technologies - enabling enterprise-grade visibility, accelerated response, and measurable infrastructure resilience without the cost barriers of proprietary SIEM platforms.

This session is designed for security engineers, SOC analysts, system administrators, and DevSecOps professionals seeking practical approaches to operationalizing threat detection, automated response, and vulnerability governance at scale.