Senior-Level Cyber Defense Incident Responder

• Coordinate incident response functions.
• Coordinate and provide expert technical support to enterprise-wide cyber defense technicians to resolve cyber defense incidents.
• Correlate incident data to identify specific vulnerabilities and make recommendations that enable expeditious remediation.
• Perform analysis of log files from a variety of sources (e.g., individual host logs, network traffic logs, firewall logs, and intrusion detection system [IDS] logs) to identify possible threats to network security.
• Perform cyber defense incident triage, to include determining scope, urgency, and potential impact, identifying the specific vulnerability, and making recommendations that enable expeditious remediation.
• Perform cyber defense trend analysis and reporting.
• Perform initial, forensically sound collection of images and inspect to discern possible mitigation/remediation on enterprise systems.
• Perform real-time cyber defense incident handling (e.g., forensic collections, intrusion correlation and tracking, threat analysis, and direct system remediation) tasks to support deployable Incident Response Teams (IRTs).
• Receive and analyze network alerts from various sources within the enterprise and determine possible causes of such alerts.
• Track and document cyber defense incidents from initial detection through final resolution.
• Employ approved defense-in-depth principles and practices (e.g., defense-in-multiple places, layered defenses, security robustness).
• Collect intrusion artifacts (e.g., source code, malware, Trojans) and use discovered data to enable mitigation of potential cyber defense incidents within the enterprise.
• Coordinate with intelligence analysts to correlate threat assessment data.
• Monitor external data sources (e.g., cyber defense vendor sites, Computer Emergency Response Teams, Security Focus) to maintain currency of cyber defense threat condition and determine which security issues may have an impact on the enterprise.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Knowledge of cyber attackers (e.g., script kiddies, insider threat, non-nation state sponsored, and nation sponsored).
• Knowledge of system administration, network, and operating system hardening techniques.
• Knowledge of cyber-attack stages (e.g., reconnaissance, scanning, enumeration, gaining access, escalation of privileges, maintaining access, network exploitation, covering tracks).
• Ability to apply techniques for detecting host and network-based intrusions using intrusion detection technologies.
• Demonstrated ability to interact effectively with senior management and leadership.
• Ability to design incident response for cloud service models.
• Knowledge of incident categories, incident responses, and timelines for responses.
• Knowledge of incident response and handling methodologies.
• Knowledge of the common networking and routing protocols (e.g. TCP/IP), services (e.g., web, mail, DNS), and how they interact to provide network communications.
• Knowledge of Application Security Risks (e.g. Open Web Application Security Project Top 10 list)

Certifications/Licenses:

• Bachelor’s degree or higher
• 6+ years’ experience in Malware analysis, digital forensics, data/network analysis, penetration testing, information assurance, trends analysis, quality control analysis, information assurance vulnerability management
• Certifications addressing identification of malicious system and user activity, incident response in an enterprise environment, incident response process and framework, timeline artifact analysis, timeline collection, timeline processing, volatile data collection, filesystem structure and analysis, artifact analysis.
• Active Secret clearance.

Additional Experience Preferred:

• Experience identifying, capturing, containing, and reporting malware.
• Skill in preserving evidence integrity according to standard operating procedures or national standards.
• Strong securing network communications experience.
• Recognizing and categorizing types of vulnerabilities and associated attacks.
• Skill in protecting a network against malware. (e.g., NIPS, anti-malware, restrict/prevent external devices, spam filters).
• Experience performing damage assessments.
• Skill in using security event correlation tools and design incident response for cloud service models.