Security Operations (SOC) 201

SOC 201: Course Overview

Security Operations (SOC) 201 is an intermediate security operations course designed to enhance your skills in detecting, investigating, and responding to complex cyber threats at scale. After establishing fundamental security operations knowledge and practical skills in SOC 101, the next logical step is to progress your career by applying advanced investigation methodologies and grasping the responsibilities of an Incident Responder and Threat Hunter.

The SOC 201 curriculum teaches analysts how to identify, hunt, and respond to real-world adversary tactics and techniques. With a practical, hands-on focus, the curriculum provides realistic scenarios where students investigate sophisticated threats across multiple systems, learning to detect and respond effectively in enterprise-scale environments. The course also integrates proactive threat hunting as part of a continuous detection and response cycle, giving analysts the mental models to identify active threats, uncover gaps, and feed insights back into investigative processes to improve future detection and response efforts.

Key Topics

• Developing an investigator's methodology
• Incident Response
• Threat Hunting
• Data transformation techniques
• Understanding and identifying anomalies
• Evidence collection and handling at scale
• Using PowerShell for Incident Response
• Hunting and responding to advanced threats following MITRE ATT&CK TTPs
• Incident investigation and root cause analysis

Prerequisites

This course relies heavily on working with IR investigations and forensic artifacts, but does not cover learning basic analysis tools. It is strongly recommended to have taken or be familiar with the Security Operations (SOC) 101 material and its prerequisites, which includes experience with:

• Networking & Operating System Fundamentals:
• Practical Help Desk (PHD) or equivalent
• Security Operations Fundamentals
• Network Traffic Analysis
• Endpoint Security Monitoring
• Log Analysis and Management
• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
• Familiarity with common Windows-based digital forensic artifacts

System Requirements

To get the most out of this course and follow along with the labs, there will be times where you need to run multiple (2-3) virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously.

Your BIOS must have virtualization technology enabled, such as Intel-VTx or AMD-V.

Processor: 64-bit Intel i5 or i7, 2.0 GHz or higher.

RAM: 16GB of RAM or more is required to efficiently run multiple VMs.

Disk Space: 250 GB of free storage. SSDs are recommended for better performance.

Note: Apple Silicon devices cannot perform the necessary virtualization natively. Hardware with native x86 support is highly recommended.

Course Objectives

Who Should Take SOC 201?

SOC 201 is designed for individuals seeking to advance their defensive security skills beyond foundational knowledge. Ideal candidates include those already familiar with core SOC concepts who are ready to develop expertise in investigating and responding to sophisticated cyber threats.

 This course is well-suited for:

Tier 2 Security/SOC Analysts

Tier 3 Security/SOC Analysts

Incident Responders

Threat Hunters

Digital Forensic Examiners