Why Are These Practices Essential for SOP Development?
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)are crucial for ensuring consistent, repeatable, and effective security operations in aSecurity Operations Center (SOC). Strengthening SOP development ensuresefficiency, clarity, and adaptabilityin responding to incidents.
1ï¸âƒ£Regular Updates Based on Feedback (Answer A)
Security threats evolve, andSOPs must be updatedbased onreal-world incidents, analyst feedback, and lessons learned.
Example: Anew ransomware variantis detected; theSOP is updatedto include aspecific containment playbookin Splunk SOAR.
2ï¸âƒ£Collaborating with Cross-Functional Teams (Answer C)
Effective SOPs requireinput from SOC analysts, threat hunters, IT, compliance teams, and DevSecOps.
Ensures thatall relevant security and business perspectivesare covered.
Example: ASOC team collaborates with DevOpsto ensure that acloud security response SOPaligns with AWS security controls.
3ï¸âƒ£Including Detailed Step-by-Step Instructions (Answer D)
SOPs should provideclear, actionable, and standardizedsteps for security analysts.
Example: ASplunk ES incident response SOPshould include:
How to investigate a security alertusing correlation searches.
How to escalate incidentsbased on risk levels.
How to trigger a Splunk SOAR playbookfor automated remediation.
Why Not the Other Options?
âŒB. Focusing solely on high-risk scenarios–All security events matter, not just high-risk ones.Low-level alertscan be early indicators of larger threats.âŒE. Excluding historical incident data– Past incidents providevaluable lessonsto improveSOPs and incident response workflows.
References & Learning Resources
📌Best Practices for SOPs in Cybersecurity:https://www.nist.gov/cybersecurity-framework 📌Splunk SOAR Playbook SOP Development: https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/SOAR 📌Incident Response SOPs with Splunk: https://splunkbase.splunk.com