• Aspiring SOC Analysts, junior cybersecurity analysts, or threat detection staff
• IT professionals transitioning to cybersecurity roles
• Students or early-career security professionals who want a recognized certification
• Anyone preparing to take Cisco 200-201 CBROPS / Cybersecurity Associate

• Basic knowledge of networking, operating systems (Windows / Linux), and general IT fundamentals
• Some exposure to security concepts is helpful but not strictly required
• A willingness to perform hands-on labs involving logs, packet captures, and security tools

• Explain core cybersecurity concepts, deployment models, and defense strategies
• Monitor network and host systems using logs, NetFlow, packet captures, and alert sources
• Recognize suspicious activity and common threats (web attacks, malware, social engineering)
• Perform endpoint analysis via logs, process inspection, and artifact detection
• Analyze intrusion vectors through packet data, protocol headers, and detection logic
• Support incident response phases in SOC operations: detect, contain, eradicate, recover
• Use SOC metrics and documentation to report performance and lessons learned
• Interpret security policies, stakeholder roles, and process workflows
• Be fully prepared to take and pass the Cisco 200-201 CBROPS / Cybersecurity Associate exam

• CIA triad, defense-in-depth, zero trust
• Differences in security deployments (network, endpoint, application)
• Agentless vs agent-based protection, legacy vs modern
• SIEM, SOAR, log management, virtual / container / cloud security
• Threat modeling, threat intelligence, reverse engineering, DevSecOps
• Risk, vulnerability, exploit, attack surfaces, security terms, CVSS metrics

• Technologies and data sources: NetFlow, packet captures, firewall logs, proxy logs
• Visibility: full packet capture vs session data vs transaction data
• Types of network & web application attacks
• Social engineering, endpoint threats (ransomware, malware)
• Evasion techniques: tunneling, encryption, proxies
• Certificate/PKI fundamentals and impact on monitoring

• Role of endpoint technologies: antivirus, host IDS, host firewall
• OS components (Windows, Linux) in security analysis
• Evidence / log types: file system, registry, process logs
• Malware analysis output, sandbox / detonation tools
• Attribution, indicators of compromise, chain of custody

• Mapping of events to technologies: IDS/IPS, firewalls, proxy, NetFlow
• False positive/negative concepts
• Deep packet inspection vs stateful filtering
• Traffic monitoring: tap vs mirror, inline vs out-of-band
• Extracting artifacts from PCAP, interpreting protocol headers
• Basic regular expressions in intrusion detection

• Asset / configuration / patch / change management
• Incident response process (NIST SP800-61) phases: preparation, detection, containment, eradication, recovery, lessons learned
• Stakeholder roles & responsibilities
• SOC metrics: time to detect, time to respond, containment time
• Use of VERIS, documentation standards, evidence handling