Security Engineer Starter Guide: Security Operations
Cybersec Café #70 - 06/03/25
If you’re looking to break into the blue team side of cybersecurity (the folks responsible for defending organizations from cyber attacks), chances are you’ll end up working within the realm of Security Operations.
While it doesn’t encompass everything a security engineer might do, SecOps is quite a broad umbrella that captures a wide range of disciplines.
Why so broad? Because in many security teams, especially smaller or underfunded ones, engineers can’t afford to specialize in just one area. You’re expected to wear multiple hats and contribute wherever the need arises.
So, if you’re considering a career in Security Operations, or are just starting out, prepare to branch out beyond your narrow lens. You’ll likely touch multiple pieces of the security puzzle, and the more you understand about each piece, the stronger you’ll be as a professional.
And whether you’re just beginning your career or are already a seasoned professional, there’s always value in expanding your knowledge:
You’re a Detection Engineer? You’ll benefit from understanding the day-to-day operations of a SOC.
Working in the SOC? Don’t just escalate to IR, understand how they triage and close incidents.
On the IR team? Learning how to Threat Hunt could help to proactively catch threats before they escalate.
Doing threat hunting? Threat modeling can give your work direction by highlighting key risks and exposures.
Everything in Security Operations fits together like a puzzle.
High-performing security teams are fluid - they respect each other's specialities but value versatility. A lot of times, the most effective team members are those who can flex across disciplines, contribute where needed, speak the language of the entire operations, but still be masters in their niche.
In this guide, I’ll walk through the core disciplines that fall under the SecOps umbrella and share how to grow your expertise in each.
The SOC
The Security Operations Center (SOC) is the backbone that makes up any solid Security Operations function.
At its core, SecOps is about implementing the tools, strategies, and workflows to detect and mitigate threats. The SOC team? They’re the analyst on the front lines monitoring alerts, triaging signals, and responding to threats in real-time.
A high-functioning SOC is equipped with the infrastructure and talent to detect and respond to security alerts as they happen. Depending on the size and maturity of the organization, this might look like:
Monitoring during business hours.
An on-call rotation.
A “Follow-the-Sun” model (24/7 coverage based on the office hours of geographic location).
No matter the model, the goal stays the same: respond quickly and efficiently to security alerts as they arise. This means:
Effective logging and monitoring in a SIEM.
Playbooks and Saved Queries for common alert types.
Automations to handle repetitive recon or response tasks.
Clear documentation and escalation processes to Incident Response.
Continuous and iterative improvement systems.
While the SOC is typically staffed by analysts with strong knowledge of the environment, I believe it’s everyone’s job in security to understand the job of a SOC - especially in smaller or resource constrained teams. No matter your role, you should be able to hop in and provide value in triaging alerts when needed.
That means having a baseline understanding of common threats, the business environment, and the tools used to investigate and respond.
So, if you’re just breaking into SecOps, start with triage. Spend a week or two triaging alerts in order to get hands-on. You’ll build context fast about the environment, investigation methodologies, learn Incident response escalation processes, and common threats.
Once you’re comfortable triaging, pivot to building playbooks and saved queries. This will test your knowledge and proactive thinking: What does a “good” response look like? How can we make this repeatable? What queries help zero in on the signal?
It’s how you go from reacting to alerts, to designing better defenses.
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Detection Engineering
If the SOC is the first line of defense, then Detection Engineers are the ones building and fine-tuning the radar.
Without high-quality detections, a SOC can’t function effectively or scale efficiently.
As a Detection Engineer, it’ll be your job to empower the SOC by ensuring alerts are high-fidelity, relevant, and actionable. You’ll need to work closely with the analysts to understand their workflows, fine-tune what gets surfaced, and reduce noise - so your team can focus on what actually matters.
It’s also your job to ensure your detection suite has proper coverage. This means you’ll need to stay up to date with threat intel and security news, understand your environment deeply, build new and iterate on existing detections, and use data (not just gut instinct) to drive improvements.
Don’t worry, I know that was a lot to take in. Let’s break it down.
Understand Your Environment: Even though you’re not the one actively triaging alerts, you should be immersed in them. Break down metrics. Learn what’s working and what isn’t. Talk to analysts to figure out where their time is being wasted and where detections are missing the mark. That’s how you build a meaningful detection strategy.
Master Your SIEM: Detection engineering lives and breathes in the SIEM. Get comfortable writing queries, testing logic, and reviewing alerts. Know your detection coverage inside and out: Where are the gaps? What signals are missing? Where’s the alert fatigue coming from?
Let Data Drive You: Detection Engineering shouldn’t be based on guesswork or hunches. Back your tuning efforts with real data, like alert volume, false positive rates, and time to triage. Use dashboard and logs to guide your decisions, not solely internal requests or assumptions.
Embrace Iteration: Detection Engineering is never “done.” Detections need regular review, testing, and improvement. Build a habit of holding tuning sessions to find what needs adjusting. The best detection suites evolve constantly based on feedback and outcomes.
The end goal is to have a detection suite composed of detections that matter - ones that reduce risk, increase your team’s confidence, and help the SOC respond faster when the real threats show up.
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Incident Response
Incident Response (IR) is one of the toughest areas of Security Operations to get hands-on experience with, especially early in your career.
Why? Because security incidents (thankfully) don’t happen every day. And when they do, your involvement might be limited, especially if your team is small or the incident is high-stakes. If you’re not invited to the war room during a major breach, don’t take it personally - trust is built over time in high-pressure scenarios and not every incident has the bandwidth for hand-holding.
That being said, volunteering to help is always the best way to learn. Even if you’re battling imposter syndrome, IR is a discipline where the most growth happens through real-world exposure. And while it can be stressful, it’s also one of the most exhilarating parts of the job, and you might just discover it’s your calling.
But if you can’t get involved in a real incident, Tabletop Exercises (TTXs) are the next best thing. These simulated scenarios help teams rehearse their response to hypothetical incidents - and many organizations run them quarterly or at least annually (often for both practice and compliance reasons).
If you’re new to IR, here’s your move: volunteer to create and lead a TTX. Yes, it’s a simulated experience, but it gives you an opportunity to understand your team’s IR processes, practice coordination and communication, build confidence leading under pressure, and helps you learn to think strategically like an attacker.
Design your scenario around your actual infrastructure. Foster your attacker’s mindset and craft a scenario on what they actually might target, how they’d move, and what potential blind spots they might exploit.
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Related Articles About Incident Response
Security Engineer Starter Guide: Incident Response & Forensics
Detection Engineering the SOC: Designing an Incident Response Playbook
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Threat Hunting
As a SecOps engineer, you should be carving out time weekly to threat hunt, even if it’s just for a single focused hour.
The return on investment is massive for both your own professional growth and your organization’s security posture:
You gain deeper familiarity with your environment’s services.
You get a better understanding of your SIEM and logging pipelines.
You get hands-on experience with the tooling and query languages.
You spend time honing your abilities to think like an attacker.
You could potentially discover security gaps, or even real threats.
At its core, threat hunting is exactly what it sounds like: proactively hunting for threats in your environment.
If your team is even semi-mature, this usually means leveraging your SIEM and digging through logs for abnormal activity. But here’s the thing - abnormal is deeply contextual. Before you can spot outliers, you need to spend time learning what “normal” looks like in your environment.
There are generally two types of hunts:
Structured Hunts: Searching for something specific, like a known IOC or attacker behavior.
Unstructured Hunts: You’re exploring without a clear target, just looking for anything that feels off.
Either approach is valid, and both help you sharpen your skills.
But remember, threat hunting is a learn-by-doing discipline. You won’t get better by reading about it, you get better by jumping in, drawing hypotheses, writing queries, and being curious.
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Cloud Security
Cloud Security is truly a monster. And the larger your environment, the harder it is to tame.
As your infrastructure scales, security must be part of the conversation from day one. If it isn’t you’ll eventually be buried under a mountain of tech debt and risky misconfigurations.
The cloud is complex, especially with the variety of vendors and constantly evolving services. But if you’re getting started, here’s some low-hanging fruit I’d focus on first:
IAM / RBAC: Every user should authenticate through a defined role that aligns with their job function.
Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP): Roles should grant only the access someone can justify with a business case. No more, no less.
Externally Facing Assets: Continuously scan for internet-exposed assets. Validate services like S3, load balancers, EC2, and Security Groups (if we’re talking AWS) are actually intended to be public.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): If your organization has the bandwidth, commit to IaC from the beginning. While it introduces some friction, it pays off with reproducibility, version control, peer reviews, and enforceable standards. Just make sure you have org-wide buy-in and the engineers to support it.
In today’s day and age, SecOps engineers must understand cloud fundamentals. We’re no longer living in an on-prem world.
Start by learning the most commonly used services in your environment - whether that’s AWS, Azure, or GCP. Understand what each service does, how it’s configured, and where it introduces risk. Then, expand from there.
Threat Modeling
In my opinion, Threat Modeling is one of the most underutilized practices in Security Operations, and one that deserves a much bigger role.
It often gets deprioritized in favor of more reactive or technical work. But when done right, threat modeling can proactively uncover risks and help harden your environment before an attacker ever has a chance.
The premise is simple: pick a service, application, or micro-service and take time to understand the architecture. Then evaluate it through the lens of an attacker. This means reviewing architectural decisions, questioning accepted risks, and manually probing potential weaknesses to understand the true attack surface.
At its core, this is a prioritization exercise - both in what you choose to model and how you act on your findings.
As a SecOps engineer, your first step is to identify what to model. Start by reading documentation and talking with engineers who have historical knowledge. Look for legacy systems or poorly documented applications - these are strong candidates..
Then, evaluate risk: Which services pose the highest potential impact if compromised?
Prioritize those.
Once you’ve completed the threat model, assign clear owners to remediation tasks and work with stakeholders to track progress and prioritize fixes.
Much like Threat Hunting, Threat Modeling is a proactive discipline and one that will level up your technical awareness as well as your communication and writing skills.
Start small, choose a narrowly scoped service, define your methodology, and start digging.
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Email Security
When it comes to attack surface, email is one of the hardest things for any business to lock down.
At its core, email security is about two things:
Protecting your users from spam and phishing attacks.
Protecting your domain from impersonation and reputational damage to your brand.
Unfortunately, default protections from providers like Google and Outlook are just average. That’s why, if budget allows, investing in a dedicated email gateway solution can be well worth it. It adds a critical layer of defense that protects your users from themselves.
Because let’s face it: humans are always the weakest link. You can (and should) train your colleagues to stay vigilant, but they won’t always listen.
But still, start with training. Make email security awareness a priority. If your company has any profile at all, your employees will be targeted. Make sure they’re reading. It’ll be a waste of time hardening the rest of your attack surface if one careless click lets danger in the front door.
If your company is email-heavy, the first technical move should be tightening your DNS records. These records define which emails are legitimate and who’s allowed to send mail on your behalf. There are three key standards to understand:
SPF: Specifies which mail servers are authorized to send on behalf of your domain.
DKIM: Uses public/private key cryptography to validate that messages weren’t altered in transit.
DMARC: Builds on SPF and DKIM to specify how providers should handle unauthenticated mail and provides visibility through reporting.
Email is finicky, so it takes time to learn how all these components work together. You’ll also need to invest in monitoring tools to gain insight into how your records are performing and what’s being spoofed.
In short: if email is critical to your business, then investing in your email security stack is non-negotiable. Start with education, implement tooling, and start putting effort into tightening up your DNS records.
It protects your people, your brand, and your bottom line.
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💬 What is your specialization in Security Operations, and what other discipline has strengthened you as professional? Let me know below!
Moving Forward
Security Operations is a blend of many different disciplines. And while that can feel overwhelming at first, it’s actually a strength.
It pushes you to become a well-rounded professional. You’ll need to understand your attack surface from multiple angles and build the technical skillset to not just contribute, but lead across different work streams.
So, don’t let the breadth of SecOps intimidate you. Instead, let it motivate you. Take it one piece at a time and commit to building your knowledge across the different specializations.
Yes, there’s a learning curve in cybersecurity. But Security Operations is a space where focused, consistent efforts can yield fast, meaningful growth.
Securely Yours,
Ryan G. Cox
P.S. The Cybersec Cafe follows a weekly cadence.
Each week, I deliver a Deep Dive on a cybersecurity topic designed to sharpen your perspective, strengthen your technical edge, and support your growth as a professional - straight to your inbox.
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For more insights and updates between issues, you can always find me on Twitter/X or my Website. Let’s keep learning, sharing, and leveling up together.