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).
Evidence Collection and Preservation
Covers the full lifecycle of handling evidentiary materials with emphasis on digital evidence and legal admissibility. Candidates should understand how to identify and secure an evidence scene, differentiate source types such as computers, storage media, mobile devices, network equipment, and cloud artifacts, and decide on appropriate power and access actions to avoid data loss. Includes hands on collection techniques such as use of write blockers, forensic imaging and logical versus physical acquisition, capturing volatile data, and preserving originals while working from verified copies. Emphasizes documentation requirements including detailed evidence logs, chain of custody records that document who handled evidence, when, and what actions were taken, hashing and verification to prove integrity, secure transport and storage, and proper storage conditions. Also covers legal and procedural topics such as standards for admissibility, consequences of contamination, coordination with legal counsel and law enforcement, differences between internal investigations and evidence intended for litigation, issuance of legal holds and preservation orders, and maintaining audit trails for review and courtroom presentation.
Malware Analysis and Artifact Identification
Understanding and dissecting malware behavior within forensic artifacts, using static and dynamic analysis techniques to identify malicious code, persistence mechanisms, and artifacts left on disk and in memory. Topics include sandboxing and behavior analysis, memory forensics to recover injected or unpacked code, creating and validating signatures or rules, linking artifacts to indicators of compromise and threat intelligence, and explaining how malware artifacts relate to attacker motive and impact on the environment.
Security Operations Collaboration
Covers the interpersonal and cross functional collaboration skills required to work effectively in security operations teams. Interviewers assess the ability to coordinate with other security analysts, share knowledge during on call rotations and incidents, perform clear handovers and maintain runbooks, and communicate under pressure during incident response. This topic also includes collaborating with engineering, system administration, compliance, legal, and business stakeholders to implement and remediate technical issues, prioritize vulnerabilities, and deploy controls. Candidates should be able to describe teamwork practices such as shift coordination, escalation paths, post incident retrospectives, clear documentation, constructive feedback, mentorship, and using collaboration tools to ensure continuity and operational resilience.
Emerging Threats and Forensics Trends
Evaluation of a candidate's perspective on how the digital forensics landscape is evolving and how organizations should prepare. Topics include the impact of increasing encryption and privacy controls on evidence availability, forensic challenges introduced by cloud services and mobile ecosystems, the emergence of new malware techniques and adversary trade craft, the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in threat detection and analysis, considerations for cross jurisdictional and legal challenges, and approaches for evaluating and adopting new forensic technologies and industry frameworks that map adversary tactics and techniques.
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.
Persistence and Command and Control
Understanding mechanisms attackers use to maintain access after compromise (scheduled tasks, registry modifications, service installation, backdoors) and how they maintain command and control channels (C2 infrastructure, reverse shells, encrypted communication). Understanding this in authorized test contexts only.
Malware and Compromise Indicators Recognition
Understanding common indicators of malware infection: unexpected network connections, unusual processes running, file system changes, system performance degradation. Recognizing signs of account compromise: failed login attempts followed by success, access to unusual resources, activity during off-hours. Understanding persistence mechanisms that attackers use. Recognizing lateral movement within a network: unusual connections between systems, unexpected data access. Knowing when a system should be isolated immediately.
Integrity and Ethical Decision Making
This topic covers professional integrity, ethical judgment, and accountability when working with forensic evidence or other high sensitivity materials. Interviewers will evaluate your commitment to evidence integrity, accuracy, confidentiality, impartiality, and legal and procedural compliance. Candidates should be ready to describe concrete situations in which they prioritized rigor over expedience, resisted pressure to reach predetermined conclusions, maintained chain of custody and secure handling of sensitive data, or escalated concerns about possible misconduct or errors. Explain your process for preventing, detecting, and correcting mistakes including documentation practices, quality control steps, peer review, root cause analysis, and corrective actions. Discuss how you assess and communicate uncertainty and limitations, how you avoid bias and conflicts of interest, and how you balance timeliness with the need for reliable results. Demonstrate an ethical framework such as professional codes of conduct, organizational policies, or legal requirements, and be prepared to describe lessons learned and process improvements you instituted to strengthen integrity.
Investigative Problem Solving
Covers investigative approaches for complex or information constrained situations, such as incident response and forensic analysis. Topics include handling encrypted or partially corrupted data, dealing with fragmented or deleted artifacts, reconciling conflicting timelines, analyzing incomplete logs, performing multi location investigations, prioritizing limited leads, documenting assumptions, preserving chain of custody where relevant, and making defensible decisions under uncertainty. Candidates should demonstrate methodical evidence collection, hypothesis driven analysis, risk management, and clear explanation of trade offs and next steps.