Become a SOC Analyst - Level 3

As a SOC analyst, your primary duty is to ensure that the organization’s digital assets are secure and protected from unauthorized access. You protect both the online and on-premise infrastructures, monitor metrics and data to identify suspicious activity, and identify and mitigate risks before adversaries breach your system. Some adversaries will still breach your system, and a SOC analyst fights the frontline battle.

As a senior-level analyst, you are expected to be a subject matter expert, threat hunter, and incident responder. This means constantly learning by reviewing alerts, industry news, threat intelligence, and security data, actively hunting for threats that have found their way into your environment, and performing assessments or tests to discover vulnerabilities and security gaps. When a major incident occurs, the Tier 3 Analyst is also often the incident response lead. It will be your responsibility to quickly contain and erradicate the threat and help restore normal network operations.

No two days are alike in a security operations center – adversaries don’t follow a specific schedule, and how much time you have to spend on an individual incident can depend on many factors. You may be able to circumvent an attack quickly in some cases, while others might take much more time, attention, and work. On a daily basis, you will need to ascertain the weaknesses of hardware, software, and network infrastructure and establish ways to protect it. But the nature of information security means each day may bring different situations, tasks, and challenges, so you’ll rarely feel bored. When a threat or an attack arises, your team will likely work nonstop to expose the attack, shut down access to your systems, resolve the issue, work to prevent the same type of attack from happening in the future, and document and communicate appropriate information to management or clients.

Most organizations look for someone with 10 years in IT administration including at least 5 years of hands-on information security technical experience, as well as experience as a mid-level SOC Analyst or related security role. IT or Offensive Security Certifications are seen as added benefits. If you are looking to gain the prerequisite security experience and skills, check out the SOC Analyst Level 1 and SOC Analyst Level 2 career paths.