Security Engineering & Operations Topics
Operational security practices, secure systems implementation, threat modeling, penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, and security operations at production scale. Covers network security, endpoint security, secure architecture implementation, incident response mechanics, and security automation. Distinct from Security & Compliance (which addresses governance, compliance frameworks, and policy) and from Security Research & Innovation (which addresses novel techniques and research contributions).
Account and Authentication Troubleshooting
Addresses support scenarios around user identity and account access. Topics include diagnosing login failures, password reset flows, email verification problems, account lockouts, two factor authentication issues, session and token handling, identity verification edge cases, and security minded approaches to handling sensitive account investigations. Candidates should understand safe verification practices, when to apply self service recovery, and when to escalate potential security incidents while protecting user data.
Incident Response Forensics and Crisis Management
Covers the full spectrum of preparing for, detecting, investigating, containing, and recovering from security and operational incidents, plus managing their business and regulatory impact. Candidates should understand the incident response lifecycle including detection and monitoring, triage and prioritization, containment, eradication, recovery, and post incident review. This includes forensic evidence preservation and analysis practices such as secure collection of logs and artifacts, tamper proofing, chain of custody, immutable storage, timeline building, memory and disk examination fundamentals, and legal and regulatory considerations for evidence. It also covers designing infrastructure and tooling to enable rapid response at scale: logging and telemetry architecture, data retention policies, secure evidence storage, automated collection and alerting, integration with runbooks and response workflows, and readiness of teams and playbooks. Finally, it addresses crisis and stakeholder management skills: incident command and coordination across engineering, security, product, legal, customer support and executive stakeholders, internal and external communications and status updates, customer and regulator notification procedures, postmortem and lessons learned processes, tabletop exercises and drills, and leadership and decision making under pressure.
Security and Access Control Troubleshooting
Diagnosing failures caused by authentication and authorization mechanisms and security controls. Areas covered include investigating authentication failures across local and centralized identity systems, inspecting permission and role assignments, validating access control lists and firewall rules that may block legitimate traffic, troubleshooting secure transport certificate problems and trust chains, debugging application programming interface authentication tokens and session issues, and verifying remote secure access configuration. Also includes guidance on performing security aware troubleshooting that preserves auditability and does not expose secrets, using logs and audit trails, and understanding common misconfigurations and remediation steps for identity and access related incidents.
User and Permission Management
Administering user identities and access controls across servers and directory services. Topics include the account lifecycle of creating modifying disabling and deleting accounts, group membership and policy based access controls, file and directory permission models and ownership on Linux and Windows file systems, configuring privilege escalation mechanisms for administrative tasks, role based access control patterns, authentication options including multi factor authentication and single sign on, audit logging and access review practices, and implementing the principle of least privilege to limit blast radius. Interviewers may probe directory services integration and reporting for compliance.
Network Security Architecture
Fundamentals and design of network security including the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol stack, Domain Name System, Hypertext Transfer Protocol and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, and common network protocols and services that impact security. Covers core network security controls such as firewalls, intrusion detection system and intrusion prevention system, network segmentation, virtual local area network design, access control lists, network access control and micro segmentation, secure tunneling and Virtual Private Networks, and secure protocol configuration such as Transport Layer Security and Internet Protocol Security. Includes threat models for network based attacks including man in the middle attacks, Domain Name System poisoning, reconnaissance, lateral movement across network boundaries, and distributed denial of service, along with detection, monitoring, logging, and incident response practices. Also covers architecture level patterns such as segmentation and zero trust networking, secure deployment of network appliances, and trade offs between performance and security.
Security Incident Response and Operations
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.
Security Fundamentals in Support Context
Basic security concepts relevant to technical support including password policies, malware, phishing, data protection, secure remote access, and security best practices. Understanding how support activities fit into overall security posture.
Incident Analysis and Root Cause
Skills for analyzing security incidents and performing root cause analysis. Topics include incident triage, timeline reconstruction, understanding attack vectors and kill chain progression, forensic evidence collection and interpretation, identifying technical and process root causes, remediation planning, and extracting lessons to prevent recurrence. Also covers communicating findings to technical and non technical stakeholders and relating technical causes to organizational controls and process weaknesses.
Handling Novel Technologies and Evidence
Covers how a candidate responds when encountering unfamiliar hardware, software, devices, file systems, encryption schemes, or novel data structures and evidence types. Assess the candidate on troubleshooting fundamentals applied to unknown systems, rapid learning and research strategies, use of documentation and external resources, when and how to engage subject matter experts, and how they validate and document new techniques. Interviewers may probe for examples of unexpected findings, how the candidate iterated on investigative approaches, risk management under time pressure, and how they ensured forensic soundness and reproducibility when standard tools or processes did not apply.