Cyber Defense Analyst (TS/SCI Full Scope)

Job Description

DUTIES Uses information collected from a variety of sources to monitor network activity and analyze it for evidence of anomalous behavior. Identifies, triages, and reports events that occur in order to protect data, information systems, and infrastructure. Finds trends, patterns, or anomaly correlations utilizing security-relevant data. Recommends proactive security measures. Conducts analysis to isolate indicators of compromise. Notify designated managers, cyber incident responders, and cybersecurity service provider team members of suspected cyber incidents and articulate the event's history, status, and potential impact for further action in accordance with the organization's cyber incident response plan.

Requirements

KILLS

• Use cyber defense tools to monitor, detect, analyze, categorize, and perform initial triage of anomalous activity.
• Generate cybersecurity cases (including event's history, status, and potential impact for further action) and route as appropriate.
• Leverage knowledge of commonly used network protocols and detection methods to defend against related abuses.
• Apply cybersecurity and privacy principles to organizational requirements (relevant to confidentiality, integrity, availability, authentication, non-repudiation).
• Perform advanced manual analysis to hunt previously unidentified threats.
• Conduct PCAP analysis.
• Identify cyber-attack phases based on knowledge of common attack vectors and network layers, models, and protocols.
• Apply techniques for detecting host- and network-based intrusions.
• Working knowledge of enterprise-level network intrusion detection / prevention systems and firewall capabilities.
• Understand the foundations of a hardened Windows network and what native services and protocols are subject to abuse (such as RDP, Kerberos, NTLM, WMI, and SMB).
• Familiarity with fragmentation of network traffic and how to detect and evaluate fragmentation-related attacks in raw packet captures.
• Conduct network - traffic, protocol, and packet-level - and netflow analysis for anomalous values that may be security-relevant using appropriate tools (such as Wireshark, tshark, tcpdump).
• Understand snort filters and how they are crafted and tuned to feed IDS alerting.
• Understand system and application security threats and vulnerabilities to include buffer overflow, SQL injection, race conditions, covert channel, replay and return-oriented attacks, malicious code, and malicious scripting.
• Analyze malicious activity to determine weaknesses exploited, exploitation methods, and effects on system and information.
• Perform event correlation using information gathered from a variety of sources within the enterprise to gain situational awareness and determine the effectiveness of an observed attack.
• Familiar with indications of Command and Control (C2) channels and what strategies attackers use to bypass enterprise defenses from a compromised host.
• Demonstrate advanced knowledge of how adversaries penetrate networks and how those attacks map to detectable events across the ATTACK framework.
• Understand how VBS, Jscript, and Powershell can be maliciously used within a network and what level of monitoring and auditing is required to detect.
• Possess deep knowledge of active directory abuse used by attackers for lateral movement and persistence.
• Provide expertise in the identification of adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) and in the development and deployment of signatures.
• Perform after-action reviews of team products to ensure completion of analysis.
• Lead and mentor team members as a technical expert.

QUALIFICATIONS A Bachelor's degree in a related discipline, plus six (6) years of professional experience is acceptable. Eight (8) years of relevant experience is acceptable if the candidate does not possess a degree. Two (2) years of demonstrated and practical experience in TCP / IP fundamentals. Two (2) years of demonstrated experience with network traffic analysis tools such as Bricata, tcpdump, or Wireshark. Three (3) years of demonstrated experience using security information and event management suites (such as Splunk, ArcSight, Kibana, and LogRhythm). Three (3) years of demonstrated experience in network analysis and threat analysis software utilization. Three (3) years of demonstrated experience maintaining or managing Cloud environments such as Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), using tools like Microsoft Sentinel.

CERTIFICATIONS & TECHNICAL PROFICIENCIES Requires DoD 8570 compliance with CSSP Analyst baseline certification. Information Assurance Technical (IAT) Level I (possess one : A CE, CCNA-Security, CND, Network CE, SSCP) or Level II (possess one : CCNA Security, CySA , GICSP, GSEC, Security CE, CND, SSCP) certification. Candidate must have Computing Environment (CE) certification, which can be fulfilled with either Microsoft OS, Cent OS / Red Hat OS CE certifications. Requires Global Information Assurances Certification (GIAC) Certified Incident Handler (GCIH) certificate or Certified Intrusion Analyst (GCIA) certificate. Requires successful completion of the Splunk software training course "Fundamentals 1".