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Splunk in Plain English — A Practical SOC Guide

Imagine you are a detective, and every device on your network — servers, laptops, firewalls, cloud systems — is leaving footprints everywhere. The problem is there are millions of footprints every single day, scattered across thousands of different files. Your job is to find the one set of footprints that does not belong. That is exactly the problem Splunk solves. It is the platform that collects every footprint from every device, puts them in one place, and gives you the tools to find the suspicious ones — fast. In this blog, I will take you through Splunk from absolute scratch — what it is, how it works under the hood, how to write SPL queries like a pro, how to build dashboards and alerts, how to set up a SOC lab, and most importantly, the interview questions you will definitely face if you are going for a SOC analyst role. I have completed the TryHackMe Advanced Splunk rooms including SPL exploration, SOC lab setup, dashboards and reports, data manipula...

Every SOC Analyst Must Know These Windows Event IDs — Here's Why

Imagine you are the security guard of a massive office building. Every time someone enters, leaves, opens a cabinet, or tries to break in — it gets recorded in a logbook. Now imagine if that logbook could automatically tell you when something suspicious happened. That is exactly what Windows Event Logs are — the logbook of your Windows system, and for a SOC analyst, it is the single most important source of truth. In this blog, we will break down Windows Event Logs from scratch — what they are, how to read them, how to query them like a pro using PowerShell, and most importantly, which Event IDs you must memorize for your SOC analyst interview. Let's dive in. 1. What Are Windows Event Logs? Windows Event Logs are records that Windows automatically creates whenever something significant happens on the system — a user logs in, a service crashes, a file is accessed, an audit policy changes, a script runs. Think...