Security Operations Center

The Security Operations Center (SOC) section is the operational security hub for this infrastructure documentation. It focuses on building a practical detection and response capability that scales from home lab environments to enterprise operations.

Use this area to define how alerts are triaged, incidents are investigated, and defensive controls are continuously improved.

SOC Mission

• Detect quickly by turning telemetry into actionable alerts
• Respond consistently with clear workflows and escalation paths
• Recover safely while preserving evidence and minimizing business impact
• Improve continuously through lessons learned and measurable outcomes

Core Capabilities

Monitoring and Detection

• Log and telemetry collection from endpoints, network devices, and services
• Detection engineering aligned to known adversary techniques
• Alert tuning to reduce false positives and analyst fatigue

Incident Response

• Severity-based triage and prioritization
• Investigation playbooks for common attack patterns
• Containment, eradication, and recovery procedures

Threat Intelligence and Hunting

• Intelligence-informed detection updates
• Hypothesis-driven threat hunting
• Mapping activity to ATT&CK-style behaviors for consistency

Compliance and Reporting

• Security control validation and evidence collection
• Operational metrics and trend reporting
• Post-incident reviews and remediation tracking

Operating Model

flowchart LR
    ingest[Telemetry Ingestion] --> detect[Detection and Alerting]
    detect --> triage[Triage]
    triage --> investigate[Investigation]
    investigate --> contain[Containment]
    contain --> recover[Recovery]
    recover --> lessons[Lessons Learned]
    lessons --> tune[Detection and Control Tuning]
    tune --> detect

SOC Workflow

1. Collect telemetry from infrastructure, identity, and application layers.
2. Correlate events into prioritized alerts.
3. Triage alerts by severity, confidence, and business impact.
4. Investigate scope, root cause, and affected assets.
5. Respond with containment and eradication actions.
6. Recover services and verify security posture.
7. Review incident outcomes and improve detections or controls.

Suggested Metrics

• MTTD (Mean Time to Detect)
• MTTR (Mean Time to Respond)
• Alert volume by severity and source
• False positive rate and tuning backlog
• Incident recurrence by category

SOC Reference Pages

• SOC Analyst Playbook
• Kusto Cheatsheet for SOC Analyst
• Microsoft Defender
• Microsoft Sentinel

SOC Runbooks

• Malware Outbreak Response
• Identity Compromise Response
• Phishing and Business Email Compromise Response
• Suspicious Cloud Activity Response
• Privileged Access Abuse Response

Adjacent Infrastructure Security Areas

• Infrastructure Security
• Identity and Access Management
• Compliance and Auditing
• Infrastructure Monitoring
• KQL

Next Build-Out Topics

• SIEM architecture and onboarding standards
• Detection rule lifecycle and quality gates
• Threat hunting methodology and cadence
• SOC dashboards and executive reporting