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CAREERS • 8 min read



THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO A LEVEL 1 SOC ANALYST INTERVIEW

Are you preparing for a SOC analyst interview? Congratulations! Interviews may
seem daunting, but they don’t have to be. You stand a greater chance of securing
a role if you have carried out the legwork to become a suitable candidate and
prepared for your upcoming SOC interview!

We previously looked at how to become a Level 1 SOC Analyst. In this guide,
we’re diving into our expert tips and answering those all-important security
operations center analyst interview questions, most specifically, for a Level 1
SOC Analyst position.


RESEARCH THE COMPANY

Pre-interview research is vital in preparing for any interview, helping you make
a great first impression on prospective employers.

As part of your company research, you should look at the company website, find
out what clients they work with, and read through a handful of their blog
articles and guides. Find out if they have recently been in the news, won
awards, or announced any significant company developments. Meanwhile, a great
way to better understand the company is by checking out review websites,
including TrustPilot, Feefo, and Reviews.io, as well as any of the company’s
social media accounts.

LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for discovering those who work at the company,
including the hiring manager interviewing you. You could even check out their
areas of expertise to find familiar topics to discuss to build rapport.

With a section dedicated to reviewing interview processes, Glassdoor can be
invaluable for understanding the types of SOC Analyst job interview questions
asked and the experience other candidates have had.


KEEP UP WITH THE INDUSTRY

To keep up with the rapidly evolving industry and increasingly sophisticated
attacks, you will most likely be asked how you tend to keep up with the latest
threats and advances.

Our SOC Analyst learning path teaches you everything you need to know in the
role, including monitoring and investigating alerts, configuring and managing
security tools, developing and implementing IDS signatures, and escalating
security incidents. The path is great for learning and initially getting to
grips with incident response, gaining a recap and refreshing your memory before
a SOC interview!

Our incident response training covers tools and real-life analysis scenarios
needed to become a SOC Analyst, regularly updated to keep up with the latest
threats.

We also recommend exploring upcoming Infosec Conferences, Security BSides and
DEF CON conferences, podcasts, webinars, and industry events, which all
contribute to keeping up-to-date with security operations! Other mediums include
Security Week, The Hacker News, PenTest Magazine, and the TryHackMe blog.


GETTING TO KNOW YOU

As some critical skills required of SOC Analysts are collaboration, skill, and
the ability to work under pressure, the interviewer will want to get to know you
better. Stay relaxed, be honest in your answers, and most importantly, be
yourself!

They will want to know why you want to become a SOC Analyst and understand your
work ethic, strengths and weaknesses, goals and aspirations, and whether you’ll
be a great cultural fit for the SOC team. While you must be the right person for
the role, it is equally important for the company to be the right fit for you.

Examples of Security Operations Centre Analyst interview questions you may be
asked include:

 * How would your coworkers or your supervisor describe your work ethic?
 * What is your greatest strength and weakness?
 * Why do you want to work for us?
 * Where do you see yourself in five or ten years?
 * What do you enjoy doing when you're not working?
 * Why should we hire you?
 * What do you know about the job?
 * Why do you want to be a SOC Analyst?
 * Do you know any programming or scripting languages?


PREPARING FOR TECHNICAL QUESTIONS

The interviewer will want to ensure you’re up to speed with the technical aspect
of the SOC Analyst role and will therefore ask you technical SOC Analyst
interview questions. You can expect to be asked in-depth technical questions, so
make sure you brush up on your core technical skills with Network Fundamentals,
Windows Fundamentals, Linux Fundamentals, and our How the Web Works modules.

Frequently asked Tier 1 SOC Analyst interview questions include:

HOW WOULD YOU EXPLAIN RISK, VULNERABILITY AND THREAT?

 * Risk refers to the level of impact on agency operations and the likelihood of
   that threat occurring
 * Vulnerability looks at weaknesses in an information system, system security
   procedures, internal controls, or implementation that could be exploited or
   triggered by a threat source
 * Threats have the potential to adversely impact operations, assets,
   individuals, or other organisations via unauthorised access, destruction,
   disclosure, modification of information, and/or denial of service

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ASYMMETRIC AND SYMMETRIC ENCRYPTION?

Symmetric encryption uses the same key to encrypt and decrypt, while asymmetric
encryption requires a pair of keys using a public key to encrypt and a private
key to decrypt the data.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN UDP AND TCP?

It’s great if you can describe both and the advantages and disadvantages of the
two! For example, UDP is a connectionless protocol, which functions in a way
that the sender distributes the data without checking if the intended recipient
receives them. TCP, on the other hand, is connection-oriented, best described as
requiring a three-way handshake to be established before any actual data is
transmitted, with the sender making sure each piece of information is received
properly.

WHAT PORT NUMBER DOES PING USE?

Ping uses ICMP so it doesn’t use any port - some cheeky interviewers really ask
this!

WHAT IS AN IPS, AND HOW DOES IT DIFFER FROM IDS?

IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) can prevent traffic, while IDS (Intrusion
Detection System) can only detect traffic.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ENCODING, ENCRYPTION AND HASHING?

Encoding ensures that different systems or programs can correctly interpret data
in its proper format, but it does not provide any security or protection for the
data. Encryption ensures the data is secure and that only those with an
encryption key have access to the data, while hashing maintains the integrity of
the data.

In summary, encoding is a reversible process that ensures data is correctly
interpreted but does not provide any security, encryption is a reversible
process that provides confidentiality and integrity protection, and hashing is a
one-way process that ensures data integrity and authentication.

GIVE EXAMPLES OF ALGORITHMS OR TECHNIQUES USED FOR ENCODING, ENCRYPTION, AND
HASHING.

 * Examples of Encoding: ASCII, Unicode, UTF-8, Base64, etc.
 * Examples of Encryption: AES, DES, RSA, Blowfish, etc.
 * Examples of Hashing: bcrypt, MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, etc.

WHEN IS "BASE64" USED IN THE CONTEXT OF ENCRYPTION?

When the key supplied for encryption is binary data. As Base64 is a
binary-to-text encoding scheme, it can be used to allow binary data to be
supplied as the encryption key. An example of this can be seen when AES is used
to encrypt an entire archive and the supplied key is the Base64 string generated
from an entire document file.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VA AND PT?

A Vulnerability Assessment (VA) identifies the security status of an
infrastructure, while a Penetration Test (PT) is a simulated cyber attack to
assess the implemented security measures.

WHAT IS THE CIA TRIAD?

The CIA triad model forms the basis of security operations, with three core
principles - confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

 * Confidentiality highlights the importance of ensuring data remains private
   and only accessible to those with appropriate authorisation.
 * Integrity consists of making sure data remains accurate, reliable, and free
   from tampering
 * Availability means that systems, networks and applications must be
   functioning and fully available when needed (this also refers to individuals
   having access when they need to)

HOW DO YOU KEEP UPDATED WITH INFORMATION SECURITY NEWS?

Ongoing training is a fantastic way to keep updated with the latest in the
industry while attending conferences, podcasts, webinars, and industry events is
also awesome! As mentioned (above) in the ‘keep up with the industry’ section,
reading news articles and following relevant professionals on social media is
highly recommended.

Some relevant influencers and content creators to follow include Katie
Paxton-Fear, Nicole Enesse, Simply Cyber, Florian Roth, Chris Greer, Alyssa
Miller, Tracy Z. Maleef, Lesley Carhart, and Marcus J. Carey.


PREPARING FOR SCENARIOS

At the end of an interview, the interviewer will typically give you a SOC
analyst interview challenge. In most cases, this will likely be an in-depth
scenario-based question to understand better how you might react during certain
work-related scenarios.

Ultimately, the interviewer wants to understand how you would respond to threats
and why you would take your chosen approach, so learning through real-world
scenarios can be highly beneficial!

For example, you may be asked:

HOW WOULD YOU TEST MALICIOUS SOFTWARE AND WHAT WOULD YOUR NEXT ACTION PLAN BE?

Malicious software must be handled with care, therefore it should only be
analysed in an isolated virtual machine, kept in a password-protected zip
folder, and only extracted when in analysis.

(Hint: TryHackMe’s Intro to Malware Analysis room details the steps to take if
you run into a suspected malware!)

HOW WOULD YOU GO ABOUT INVESTIGATING AN ALERT FROM START TO FINISH?

This kind of question gauges the mindset of a candidate. The weight of the
question depends on how specialized the position is as higher level members of
the team require deeper levels of insight in terms of how they understand the
process, and the decision making involved within that process.

Generally, you would want to check the alert itself - what triggered this
finding? Is the analytic working properly or is it one of those alerts that need
tuning as its more noisy than actionable? What kind of analytic triggered - is
it a direct analytic that immediately shows suspicious behavior or is it one of
those analytics that trigger just to inform you about a watchlist / correlation
induced?

After that, you would want to check the actual finding. What exactly happened
here and what kind of investigation do I need to do to further filter it out?
What data sources do I need to check to correlate with the alert findings? Which
people do I need to contact to confirm whether the specific behavior is expected
in the business perspective?

After that, do the actual investigation which will hopefully give an outright
conclusion and it depends here whether you will escalate it to trigger an
incident response, escalate it for further investigation that needs more
specialized skills like endpoint and memory forensics, or tune it down so it
doesn’t alert under the same circumstances as you’ve already ruled it out before
and most probably is a recurring behavior in the environment.

WHAT STEPS WOULD YOU TAKE AFTER IDENTIFYING A RANSOMWARE ATTACK?

After identifying a ransomware attack, you would first explore the nature of the
attack and locate compromised accounts, affected devices, and affected
applications. You should then contain the ransomware to protect malware from
inflicting more damage, investigate to determine the extent of the issue,
recover with the support of an action plan, and restore
corrupted/damaged/deleted files from backups.

THE WORLD HAS RECENTLY BEEN HIT BY AN ATTACK/VIRUS. WHAT WOULD YOU DO TO PROTECT
YOUR ORGANISATION AS A SOC ANALYST?

Discuss the steps you would take to handle the incident, including you would do
at the physical layer and the network layer. Your answer should include
monitoring and investigating the threat, and the ways in which you would
mitigate risk for your organisation. For serious threats, you would likely
escalate the threat to a Level 2 SOC Analyst. Try to think back to a recent news
story and how you can implement this into your answer.

The following modules can provide you with an in-depth understanding of how to
tackle scenario-based interview questions:

 * Phishing Investigation - Learn how to analyse and defend against phishing
   emails, and investigate real-world phishing attempts using a variety of
   techniques
 * Malware Analysis - Analyse malicious files to prevent malicious actions and
   identify attacks
 * Endpoint Security Monitoring - Monitoring activity on workstations is
   essential, as that’s where adversaries spend the most time trying to achieve
   their objectives
 * Network Security - Learn the basics of passive and active network
   reconnaissance, and understand how common protocols work and their attack
   vectors
 * Cyber Threat Intelligence - Learn about identifying and using available
   security knowledge to mitigate and manage potential adversary actions


GOOD LUCK!

We hope our top tips help you feel more confident and prepared for your SOC
Analyst interview. Follow the advice our SOC experts have mentioned above, and
you’ll have a greater chance of securing the role!

Don’t forget to brush up on your skills before attending the interview. Our SOC
Level 1 training path covers a wide array of tools and real-life analysis
scenarios relevant to a SOC Analyst position.

Prepare with SOC Analyst Training

We love to hear all about TryHackMe users’ journeys to achieving careers, so
feel free to reach out on our Discord server if you’ve secured an interview or
have recently been offered a SOC Analyst position. Check out Hayden’s Success
Story to find out how Hayden, a dedicated TryHackMe user, secured a SOC Analyst
role with the help of our SOC Analyst training!

“In my interview for the SOC Analyst position, I could answer all the technical
questions solely based on the knowledge I gained from TryHackMe. The
interviewers were impressed that although I had no industry experience, I had
been exposed to a variety of tools and frameworks.”


Hayden Nolan, Hayden’s Success Story

Be prepared, enthusiastic, confident, and most importantly, good luck!



Ellie Gillard
May 16 2023



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