50 Security Operations Engineer Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

You need to ensure that security analysts can investigate alerts in Google Security Operations without being able to change detection rules or platform configuration. What is the best approach?

You want to ingest Google Cloud audit logs into Google Security Operations with minimal operational overhead and reliable delivery. Which approach is recommended?

An analyst receives an alert that indicates suspicious IAM activity. What is the MOST appropriate first action to quickly determine impact in Google Cloud?

Your organization wants every security incident to have consistent documentation, ownership, and status tracking from triage through closure. What capability should you use?

You are investigating repeated failed login attempts across multiple user accounts from a small set of IP addresses. You want to determine whether the IPs are associated with known malicious infrastructure. What is the best next step?

A detection rule is generating a large number of false positives because it triggers on routine administrative activity during business hours. You want to reduce noise without missing true incidents. What is the best approach?

During an active incident, you need to contain a suspected compromised Compute Engine VM while preserving forensic evidence. What is the best containment action?

You want to automatically open a case and assign it to the on-call responder when a high-severity alert is generated, and also notify a collaboration channel. Which design best meets this requirement?

Your SOC needs to correlate events across Cloud Audit Logs, VPC Flow Logs, and endpoint telemetry to detect lateral movement. Data arrives with inconsistent timestamps and some sources have clock drift. What is the best strategy to improve correlation accuracy?

You are designing an automated response that disables a service account when suspicious token usage is detected. False positives could cause outages if critical workloads lose access. What is the most appropriate design?

Your SOC wants to ensure that all cloud security findings are normalized and triaged consistently across multiple Google Cloud projects. Which approach best supports consistent ingestion, normalization, and triage workflows in Google SecOps?

An analyst is investigating an alert and needs to quickly pivot from a suspicious IP address to related activity (users, hostnames, and other IPs) across all ingested telemetry in Google SecOps. What is the MOST appropriate feature to use?

You need to limit who can close incidents in Google SecOps while still allowing analysts to add comments and evidence. What is the BEST way to enforce this?

A detection rule is firing on a large number of events that are known to be benign for a specific internal subnet. You want to reduce false positives without losing visibility for other sources. What is the BEST approach?

Your organization wants high-fidelity detections for suspicious Google Cloud API activity, including identifying anomalous use of service accounts and privileged IAM changes. Which telemetry source is MOST directly useful for these detections?

During an incident, you need to preserve evidence and maintain chain-of-custody for artifacts (queries, screenshots, file hashes, and extracted logs) within the case workflow. What is the BEST practice within a modern SOC process using Google SecOps?

You want to automatically open a case and enrich an alert when a high-confidence detection triggers (for example, a known malware hash). The enrichment should include WHOIS details for the destination domain and the asset owner of the affected VM. What is the BEST solution pattern?

After ingesting logs into Google SecOps, an analyst notices that user identifiers appear inconsistently (sometimes as email, sometimes as an ID). This breaks correlation and causes missed detections. What should you do FIRST to improve correlation reliability?

A critical incident requires immediate containment of a suspected compromised Compute Engine VM. Your organization’s policy requires containment actions to be reversible and minimally disruptive to evidence collection. What is the BEST immediate containment action?

Your SOC ingests high-volume telemetry and runs detections in near real time. During peak periods, detections fall behind and alerts arrive delayed, impacting response SLAs. You need to design a resilient approach that keeps detections timely without losing data fidelity. What is the BEST architectural approach?

Your SOC team wants to monitor for anomalous data exfiltration from Google Cloud Storage. They need a managed way to detect suspicious access patterns and get security findings without building custom analytics pipelines. What should you implement?

You need to ensure only approved service accounts can invoke a sensitive Cloud Run service. Requests from the public internet must be rejected, and access should be enforced with Google Cloud IAM. What is the best approach?

During an investigation, an analyst needs to quickly view which IAM principal made a specific change to a firewall rule in a project. Where should they look first?

Your organization uses Chronicle SIEM. You want to ingest Cloud Logging data from multiple Google Cloud projects while minimizing operational overhead and ensuring logs are normalized for security analytics. What is the recommended ingestion pattern?

You are responding to a suspected compromise of a Compute Engine VM. You must preserve forensic evidence while quickly preventing any further outbound connections from that VM. The VM hosts a critical workload and must remain running if possible. What should you do?

An investigation shows repeated "permission denied" errors in Cloud Audit Logs for a user attempting to access Secret Manager secrets. You want to determine whether this is benign misconfiguration or an attempted privilege escalation. What is the most effective next step?

Your team uses Security Command Center findings and wants to streamline case management. When a high-severity finding is created, a case should be opened in a ticketing system with key context, and subsequent updates to the finding should be added to the same case. What design best meets this requirement?

Your organization wants to prevent data exfiltration by ensuring BigQuery datasets containing regulated data cannot be accessed from outside approved networks and cannot be copied to projects outside a specific set. Which solution best enforces this at the platform level?

You detect suspicious processes on a GKE node and suspect container breakout. You need high-fidelity, queryable telemetry about process executions, file events, and network connections from Linux hosts to support investigation across the fleet. What should you deploy?

A critical incident requires temporarily blocking all access to a specific Google API (for example, to prevent further changes while investigating) across hundreds of projects in an organization. You need a fast, centrally managed control that is reversible and auditable. What should you do?

Your SOC wants to reduce alert fatigue by ensuring only high-fidelity findings create tickets. You use Google Security Command Center (SCC) and want alerts only when findings are ACTIVE, HIGH severity, and from a specific source. What is the recommended approach?

An analyst needs to quickly verify whether a suspicious IP has accessed Google Cloud resources in the last 24 hours across multiple projects. Which data source should the analyst query first for the fastest confirmation of inbound/outbound connections?

Your organization uses Chronicle. You want to normalize security telemetry from multiple sources so detection rules can be written once and applied consistently. Which Chronicle concept provides this normalization layer?

You are creating an incident response runbook for compromised service account keys. What should be the FIRST action to limit further damage while preserving evidence for later investigation?

A detection rule in Chronicle is generating false positives because many events lack a user identifier; the user field is sometimes in a different location depending on the log source. What is the best way to improve detection reliability without duplicating rules per source?

Your organization wants SOAR playbooks to open cases in an external ticketing system only after an analyst approves the action. The approval must be recorded for audit. What design best meets this requirement?

Security leadership requests a metric showing the percentage of findings that were remediated within the defined SLA (for example, 7 days) and wants to trend it over time. Which approach is most appropriate?

A SOAR workflow ingests SCC findings from Pub/Sub. Occasionally, the same finding triggers duplicate case creation due to message redelivery. How should you modify the design to prevent duplicate cases while keeping at-least-once delivery?

An attacker is suspected of using a compromised service account to call multiple Google Cloud APIs from outside your network. You need to investigate quickly and determine which resources were accessed and from where. Which combination of logs is MOST effective to pivot on identity, API method, and caller IP across projects?

You must design an automated containment action for suspected compromised Compute Engine VMs. Requirements: (1) immediately stop lateral movement, (2) preserve disk evidence for forensics, (3) minimize impact on other workloads, and (4) allow reversal after investigation. What is the best approach?

You need to quickly validate whether a newly onboarded GCP project is emitting logs required for security monitoring. Which approach provides the fastest verification with minimal setup?

Your SOC is investigating suspicious access to a Compute Engine VM. You need to determine which principal performed a specific API call and from where. What is the best log source to query first?

You are creating a case for a phishing investigation and need to ensure evidence is preserved and actions are tracked for auditability. What is the recommended operational approach?

A detection rule is generating frequent false positives because it triggers on service accounts used by an automated deployment pipeline. You need to reduce noise without lowering security coverage for human activity. What is the best adjustment?

You suspect a compromised user is accessing sensitive objects in Cloud Storage. You want to identify which objects were read and correlate activity to a principal. What should you enable or query to investigate most effectively?

An incident requires isolating a compromised VM while preserving it for forensics. The VM hosts multiple services, and you must minimize blast radius quickly. What is the best first containment action in GCP?

Your organization wants to automatically open a case when a high-severity finding is created, enrich it with asset details, and notify the on-call channel. Which design best supports integration and automation on Google Cloud?

A detection engineer wants to verify whether a suspicious IP is communicating with multiple VMs across different subnets. Which combination provides the most direct network-level evidence in GCP?

You need to implement an organization-wide control to prevent disabling security-relevant logging (for example, turning off VPC Flow Logs or changing log sinks) except by a small break-glass group. What is the most robust approach?

A sophisticated attacker may attempt to evade detection by generating large volumes of benign logs (alert flooding) and by targeting logging pipelines. You need an architecture that maintains detection capability and supports investigation even during partial pipeline disruption. What is the best design?