Security Operations (SOC)
Move beyond "Ticket Counting". Building a Data-Driven SOC and designing for failure.
The Data-Driven SOC Pipeline
Goal: Reduce MTTD & MTTRA modern SOC isn't just people staring at screens; it's a Big Data engineering problem. We treat logs as an event stream that needs real-time processing, not just storage.
Ingestion
Raw logs from Nginx, K8s, Linux.
Processing
Normalization, Enrichment (GeoIP), Parsing.
Hot/Cold Storage
ES for searching (7 days), S3 for compliance (1 year).
Alerting & SOAR
Rule matching -> Slack/PagerDuty.
The "Mickey Mouse" Operations (MMO) Hall of Shame
"Mickey Mouse Operations" (MMO) is a term for amateurish practices often found in rigid TradFi environments that create the illusion of security while introducing massive fragility.
HTTP inside VPN
Believing 'It's internal, so it's safe'. Result: One phished laptop compromises the entire internal network.
Manual Key Rotation
Storing SSH keys in a shared Excel file. Result: Keys are never rotated because 'it might break something'.
The 'Bastion' Bottleneck
Forcing all 500 engineers through a single Windows Jump Server. Result: Everyone shares the 'Administrator' password.
IP Whitelisting Mania
Using IP addresses as identity. Result: massive outages when cloud IPs change dynamically.
Design for Failure
Assume the breach will happen. How does the system behave? Does it fail open or closed? Is there a circuit breaker?
Circuit Breakers
Stop cascading failures. If the Auth Service is slow, fail fast instead of hanging all 50 microservices.
Bulkheads
Isolate critical failures. The "Payment" module crashing shouldn't take down the "Login" page.
Immutable Backups
Ransomware protection. Write-once-read-many (WORM) storage for critical data.
Chaos Engineering
Proactively killing pods in production to verify auto-recovery works.