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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.

EasySystem Design
0 practiced
Design a minimal security incident ticketing workflow for SREs and SOC analysts. Define required ticket fields, priority mapping, lifecycle states, attachments and evidence fields, SLAs for each state, and automated transitions (e.g., auto-close after verification). Explain how this integrates with post-incident review.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
A malicious dependency was introduced into your build pipeline and pushed to production, compromising multiple services. As SRE lead, describe immediate containment (stop pipeline, freeze artifacts), ways to identify affected services and builds (provenance, artifact metadata), how to revoke compromised artifacts, coordinate with security/legal/product, and design long-term controls to secure the build system.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Discuss the legal and technical considerations for preserving and presenting chain-of-custody for forensic artifacts in cloud-native environments. Include timestamp integrity, signing, access controls, jurisdictional concerns, and how to prove non-repudiation to auditors or courts.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Implement a function in Python that computes a composite security incident severity score from signals: error_rate (0-1), auth_fail_spike (0-1), outbound_bytes_anomaly (0-1), and intel_risk (0-1). Use configurable weights and return a normalized 0-100 score. Provide a sample input and expected output.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Discuss trade-offs between fully automatic containment actions (for example auto-block IPs or auto-terminate instances) and manual intervention. Propose a decision framework that uses confidence levels, blast radius estimation, and canary strategies to govern when automation is allowed.

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