BC Skills Academy

Security Operations & Incident Response

Detect, triage and respond to security incidents like a blue team

Key facts

About the Security Operations & Incident Response certification

The Security Operations & Incident Response certification validates that you can operate inside a modern Security Operations Center (SOC) and lead an incident from first alert to lessons learned. It is a blue-team credential built around how defenders actually work: collecting and correlating telemetry, triaging alerts, hunting threats and running the incident-response lifecycle under pressure. You will master the SOC mission and tier model, SIEM engineering (log collection, correlation, use cases and tuning), EDR/XDR detection and response, and the full NIST incident-response lifecycle — preparation, detection & analysis, containment, eradication, recovery and lessons learned. The exam covers the cyber kill chain and MITRE ATT&CK as detection frameworks, threat intelligence and IOCs, log sources and analysis, detection engineering, alert triage and false-positive management, digital-forensics fundamentals (evidence handling, chain of custody, memory and disk), malware-analysis concepts, threat hunting hypotheses, vulnerability management, security metrics (MTTD/MTTR), playbooks and SOAR automation, and incident communication and escalation. It is tool-agnostic: the tradecraft transfers across Splunk, Sentinel, Elastic, CrowdStrike, Defender and the rest. Candidates should already hold the Network Security & Defense credential or equivalent hands-on experience.

Course outline

The Security Operations & Incident Response — Study Guide course covers:

  1. The SOC & the SIEM — How a Security Operations Center is structured and how a SIEM turns raw logs into detections. (3 lessons)
  2. Detection Engineering & Triage — Building high-fidelity detections, then triaging alerts with enrichment and prioritization. (3 lessons)
  3. The Incident Response Lifecycle — The NIST six-phase lifecycle from preparation through lessons learned, plus communication and escalation. (3 lessons)
  4. Kill Chain, ATT&CK & Threat Intelligence — Modeling intrusions with the kill chain and ATT&CK, and operationalizing threat intel and IOCs. (3 lessons)
  5. Forensics, Hunting & Metrics — Digital-forensics fundamentals, proactive threat hunting, vulnerability management and SOC metrics. (3 lessons)

Prerequisites

Frequently asked questions

Is the Security Operations & Incident Response certificate verifiable?
Yes. Every certificate issued by BC Skills Academy carries a unique credential ID that anyone can check on the public verification page.
How is the Security Operations & Incident Response exam structured?
It is a timed, randomized multiple-choice exam of 66 questions in 90 minutes, graded instantly; you need 75% to pass.
Can I get a refund?
Full refund within 7 days of purchase if you have not started the exam. Once the exam has been started or completed, the purchase is no longer refundable.

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