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Incident Investigation and Remediation Questions

Focuses on systematic investigation methodology and the distinction between immediate mitigation and long term prevention. Topics include collecting and preserving evidence, establishing a reliable timeline, identifying affected systems, performing root cause analysis, containment versus remediation, and documenting findings. Covers basic digital forensics principles and chain of custody, techniques for reducing blast radius and restoring service as a short term response, and planning permanent fixes to prevent recurrence. Also addresses privacy incident investigation practices such as interviewing stakeholders, assessing regulatory and compliance implications, timeliness and documentation requirements, remediation planning, and using post incident analysis to improve processes and controls.

MediumTechnical
0 practiced
A monitoring alert shows large outbound traffic from several hosts and a customer reports sensitive files appearing online. As SRE on-call, walk through the immediate containment steps you would take to reduce blast radius and restore service while preserving forensic evidence. Include CLI/network actions, temporary ACLs, feature flag toggles, and guidance on what to snapshot or capture first.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Explain how you would perform Root Cause Analysis (RCA) on a recurring outage using both the '5 Whys' technique and causal graphs/fault-tree analysis. Show how you would derive actionable, prioritized fixes from each method and how you'd verify that your fixes remediate the true root cause rather than symptoms.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the legally defensible steps and documentation an SRE team must produce during a data privacy breach to comply with GDPR and CCPA notification requirements. Include timelines for notification, how to map and identify affected data subjects, specific logs/evidence to retain, and how to coordinate actions with Privacy and Legal teams.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Design a database forensic plan to detect and prove unauthorized data tampering in a relational database. Include how you'd use WAL/binlogs, logical auditing, row-level checksums or hashes, immutable append-only logs, and anomaly-detection queries to reconstruct a tamper timeline and provide evidence suitable for legal review.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
A Kubernetes cluster has a malicious DaemonSet that persists despite attempts to delete it. Outline a forensic and remediation plan to (1) identify how the DaemonSet was created and why it persisted, (2) collect cluster evidence (API server audit logs, etcd snapshots), (3) safely remove malicious objects while preserving evidence, and (4) harden the cluster to prevent recurrence.

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