Most Important Questions and Answers For SIEM (SOC)
Discover the most important questions and answers for SIEM (SOC) to prepare effectively. Enhance your knowledge & skills for successful career in cybersecurity.
1. What is a Security Operations Center (SOC)?
Answer: A SOC is a centralized unit responsible for monitoring, detecting, responding to, and mitigating security incidents in an organization’s IT infrastructure.
2. What are the key responsibilities of a SOC analyst?
Answer: Responsibilities include monitoring security alerts, analyzing and investigating incidents, responding to incidents, managing threat intelligence, and ensuring proper documentation.
3. What is the difference between a SOC and a NOC?
Answer: A SOC focuses on security-related issues, while a NOC (Network Operations Center) monitors and manages network performance and availability.
4. What are the different SOC tiers?
Answer: Typically, there are three tiers:
Tier 1: Monitors and triages alerts.
Tier 2: Investigate incidents further.
Tier 3: Performs threat hunting, forensics, and advanced incident handling.
5. What is an Incident Response (IR)?
Answer: IR is a process to identify, contain, eradicate, and recover from security incidents like data breaches or malware attacks.
Technical Questions
6. What is SIEM, and how does it work?
Answer: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems aggregate, analyze, and correlate security events in real-time, providing insights for incident detection.
7. What are the key components of a SIEM solution?
Answer: Log collection, normalization, correlation engine, alerting, dashboards, and reporting.
8. Explain the difference between IDS and IPS.
Answer: IDS (Intrusion Detection System) monitors and detects suspicious activities, while IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) detects and takes action to prevent them.
9. What is a false positive in security monitoring?
Answer: A false positive is when a security system flags benign activity as malicious.
10. What is a vulnerability scan, and how is it different from a penetration test?
Answer: A vulnerability scan identifies known vulnerabilities in a system, while a penetration test actively exploits those vulnerabilities to assess security.
11. Explain what a firewall does.
Answer: A firewall filters incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predefined security rules to block unauthorized access.
12. What is the kill chain in cybersecurity?
Answer: The kill chain is a model used to understand and prevent cyber attacks. It includes steps like reconnaissance, weaponization, delivery, exploitation, installation, command and control, and actions on objectives.
13. What is lateral movement in a cyber attack?
Answer: Lateral movement refers to attackers moving within a network after initial compromise, seeking to escalate privileges or access sensitive data.
14. What is the MITRE ATT&CK framework?
Answer: It’s a comprehensive matrix of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that adversaries use during attacks, designed to help organizations understand and defend against threats.
15. Explain the concept of threat hunting.
Answer: Threat hunting is a proactive search for hidden threats or malicious activities within a network that may not have triggered alerts.
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Log and Network Analysis Questions
16. What type of logs do you analyze in a SOC?
Answer: Firewall logs, IDS/IPS logs, system logs, application logs, proxy logs, and antivirus logs.
17. What are some key log sources for monitoring in a SOC?
Answer: Firewalls, SIEMs, DNS servers, web proxies, and endpoints.
18. What is packet sniffing?
Answer: Packet sniffing is the process of capturing and analyzing network traffic to detect anomalies or malicious activity.
19. What is NetFlow?
Answer: NetFlow is a network protocol that collects IP traffic information, providing insights into traffic patterns and network activity.
20. What is DNS tunneling, and how is it detected?
Answer: DNS tunneling is an attack method that encodes data in DNS queries. It’s detected by monitoring unusual DNS query patterns and inspecting packet payloads.
21. What is a zero-day vulnerability?
Answer: A zero-day vulnerability is a security flaw in software that is unknown to the vendor and hasn’t been patched, leaving systems exposed.
22. How do you differentiate between normal and abnormal network behavior?
Answer: By establishing baselines for normal traffic patterns and monitoring for deviations that indicate potential security incidents.
23. What is the OSI model?
Answer: The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model is a conceptual framework that standardizes the communication functions of a telecommunication or computing system into seven layers.
24. Explain TCP/IP’s three-way handshake.
Answer: The process of establishing a connection between a client and a server involves three steps: SYN (synchronize), SYN-ACK (synchronize acknowledgment), and ACK (acknowledgment).
25. What is an IP address?
Answer: An IP address is a unique identifier assigned to devices on a network for communication purposes.
Threat Intelligence and Malware Analysis Questions
26. What is threat intelligence?
Answer: Threat intelligence is the collection and analysis of information about threats and adversaries to understand their capabilities, motives, and tactics.
27. What is a hash function, and why is it important in malware detection?
Answer: A hash function converts data into a fixed-length string. It’s important in malware detection because file hashes can identify malware signatures.
28. Explain what ransomware is.
Answer: Ransomware is malware that encrypts a victim’s data and demands a ransom for the decryption key.
29. What is phishing?
Answer: Phishing is a social engineering attack where attackers impersonate legitimate entities to trick users into providing sensitive information or clicking on malicious links.
30. What are Indicators of Compromise (IOCs)?
Answer: IOCs are artifacts (like IP addresses, file hashes, and domain names) that signal a potential security breach.
31. How do you handle a malware outbreak?
Answer: Isolate infected systems, contain the spread, analyze malware, eradicate it, and recover the systems.
32. What is a Trojan horse in cybersecurity?
Answer: A Trojan horse is malware disguised as legitimate software, tricking users into installing it.
33. What is the difference between a virus and a worm?
Answer: A virus requires a host program to execute and spread, while a worm is self-replicating and spreads without user intervention.
34. What is the role of sandboxing in malware detection?
Answer: Sandboxing isolates suspicious files or programs in a controlled environment to observe their behavior without risking harm to the system.
35. What is fileless malware?
Answer: Fileless malware operates in memory, without writing any files to disk, making it harder to detect using traditional antivirus solutions.
Scenario-Based Questions
36. What would you do if you saw a spike in outbound traffic from a single host?
Answer: Investigate the host for potential malware, check for exfiltration attempts, and isolate if needed.
37. How do you respond to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack?
Answer: Implement rate-limiting, activate DDoS mitigation services, analyze the attack vector, and block malicious IP addresses.
38. What steps would you take if a user reports a phishing email?
Answer: Verify the legitimacy of the email, report it to the email provider, block the sender, and educate the user on phishing threats.
39. What is your process for handling a data breach?
Answer: Identify and contain the breach, preserve evidence, notify relevant parties, remediate vulnerabilities, and review and improve security controls.
40. If you detect an unauthorized device on the network, how would you proceed?
Answer: Isolate the device, investigate its purpose and potential malicious activity, and take corrective action, including removing it from the network.
Compliance and Best Practices
41. What is the principle of least privilege?
Answer: The principle of least privilege states that users and systems should only have the minimum level of access necessary to perform their tasks.
42. What is the difference between encryption and hashing?
Answer: Encryption is reversible and is used to protect data confidentiality, while hashing is a one-way process used for integrity verification.
43. What is multi-factor authentication (MFA)?
Answer: MFA requires users to provide two or more verification factors (e.g., password and a one-time code) to gain access to an account.
44. What is data exfiltration, and how do you prevent it?
Answer: Data exfiltration is the unauthorized transfer of data out of a network. Prevent it by monitoring outbound traffic, using DLP solutions, and applying proper access controls.
45. What is GDPR, and why is it important?
Answer: The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an EU law governing data protection and privacy for individuals, which is crucial for organizations’ handling.
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