Security Incident Response and Operations Questions

Covers the practices, processes, and tooling for responding to security incidents and operating a security capability. Topics include the security incident lifecycle of preparation, detection, analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and post incident review; development and execution of playbooks and runbooks tailored to threat types; severity classification and decision criteria for escalation; evidence preservation and forensic analysis and chain of custody; crisis communication to stakeholders and regulators; notification and regulatory compliance considerations; and coordination with legal, privacy, communications, and executive leadership. Also includes operational aspects of building and staffing a security operations center, on call schedules and escalation, ticketing and case management, leadership and coordination during major incidents, running blameless post incident reviews to identify systemic improvements, and integration of security incident learnings into engineering and operations.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

What makes a post-incident review (postmortem) blameless and effective for ML incidents? Describe the structure of a review (timeline, root cause analysis, corrective actions), who should attend, artifacts to produce (what data and experiments to reproduce), and how to convert findings into measurable engineering improvements.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

A model leak exposes sensitive attributes tied to EU residents and potentially triggers GDPR. Describe a regulatory notification strategy: how to map affected data subjects, required timelines (72 hours), evidence you will need, cross-border data transfer considerations, and a sample outline of the initial notification to the supervisory authority and to affected users.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Write a CI job (GitHub Actions or GitLab CI pseudocode) that runs after building a model-serving container image and checks for world-writable files, presence of suid binaries, and unexpected network utilities like curl or nc. The job should fail if any checks detect risky items and print a short report of findings.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

An explanation endpoint is suspected of leaking sensitive attributes (for example, membership inference via model explanations). Describe immediate incident response steps that balance mitigation vs evidence preservation: temporarily disable endpoint vs throttle, collect sample queries, notify privacy/legal, and outline longer-term remediation options.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Architect a multi-region incident response and forensic pipeline for an ML platform deployed across multiple AWS accounts. Requirements: centralized detection and alerting, immutable evidence storage with cross-region replication, low-latency alerting for critical incidents, data residency constraints, and capability to support regulatory audits. Describe components, IAM boundaries, key management, and event flow.

Unlock Full Question Bank

Get access to hundreds of Security Incident Response and Operations interview questions and detailed answers.

Join thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.