Terrell A. Lancaster
Back to work
Case Study

Multi-Site Zero-Trust SOC with AI-Driven Triage

A self-hosted security operations center protecting multiple home networks across separate physical sites — enterprise-grade monitoring, built and run on commodity hardware, with an AI analyst handling first-line alert triage.

Zero-TrustSIEM / SOCEDRAI TriageWireGuard
3
Sites monitored
24/7
Continuous coverage
~$6–7/mo
Total run cost
Minutes
Alert → investigation

The Problem

Consumer networks have effectively zero security visibility. Across multiple households, there was no central place to see authentication events, software installs, vulnerabilities, or suspicious process activity — and no way to respond before something spread.

The constraint: build something with the rigor of an enterprise SOC, but on commodity hardware, owner-operated, with the data staying on-premises — and without a full-time analyst watching a screen.

Architecture

A hub-and-spoke design: each site runs lightweight endpoint agents that report to a self-hosted SIEM over an encrypted overlay. An always-on node acts as the SOC hub, where an LLM analyst triages alerts and surfaces only what matters.

Endpoints (per site)
Workstation EDR agentsDNS sinkholeNetwork telemetry
Encrypted transport
Zero-trust WireGuard overlayTailnet break-glass
SOC hub (always-on node)
Self-hosted SIEM/SOCAlert correlation + rulesLLM analyst — triage
Operator
Prioritized alertsOn-demand investigationsResponse actions

Approach

  • Deployed endpoint agents across sites reporting authentication events, software installs, service changes, vulnerabilities, and process activity to a central self-hosted SIEM.
  • Connected sites over a zero-trust WireGuard overlay with a separate break-glass path — no inbound exposure, encrypted end to end.
  • Built an AI analyst layer that queries the alert store, triages noise from signal, and produces plain-language investigations on demand — so monitoring scales without a human watching dashboards.
  • Tuned detection rules and tested them safely before promotion, treating the SOC config as version-controlled infrastructure.

Outcomes

  • 3 — Sites monitored
  • 24/7 — Continuous coverage
  • ~$6–7/mo — Total run cost
  • Minutes — Alert → investigation
Stack
Wazuh (SIEM/SOC)WireGuardTailscaleDockermacOS / Linux EDRDNS sinkholeLLM analyst
    Ask Terrell's AI