We’re currently looking for an experienced Incident Response Analyst to join our client’s growing Cyber Security function, supporting the detection, investigation and resolution of cyber security incidents across a complex enterprise environment.
This is an excellent opportunity for a security professional with strong incident response, threat hunting and investigation experience who enjoys working across the full incident lifecycle while engaging with both technical and business stakeholders.
Location: London (2 days per week onsite, remainder remote)
Duration: 5 Months Initially
Rate: Competitive
IR35: Outside IR35
Start Date: ASAP
Duties and Responsibilities:
Incident Detection, Triage and Response:
- Monitor and analyse alerts from SIEM, EDR/XDR, identity, email, cloud, network and other security controls to identify suspicious or malicious activity.
- Triage alerts, validate incidents, determine severity and business impact, and escalate in line with the incident response process and defined service levels.
- Lead or support investigations into internal and external threats, including phishing, malware, account compromise, data loss, unauthorised access and suspicious network activity.
- Coordinate containment, eradication and recovery activities with infrastructure, application, identity, cloud and business teams, maintaining clear ownership and decision records.
- Maintain accurate incident case records, investigation timelines, evidence, actions, decisions and closure rationale from initial detection through to resolution.
- Provide timely incident updates and concise technical and management reports, including material facts, impact, risk, actions, dependencies and next steps.
Digital Forensics and Investigation:
- Collect, preserve and analyse endpoint, server, identity, network, email and cloud artefacts in accordance with approved forensic and evidence-handling procedures.
- Perform host and network analysis using logs, packet captures, forensic images and security telemetry to establish scope, root cause, attacker activity and affected assets.
- Identify indicators of compromise, tactics, techniques and procedures, and map findings to MITRE ATT&CK where appropriate.
- Support legally or regulatorily sensitive investigations by maintaining evidence integrity, chain of custody and appropriate access controls.
- Engage specialist internal or external forensic support where the complexity, scale or sensitivity of an incident requires additional expertise.
Threat Hunting and Detection Improvement:
- Develop and execute hypothesis-led threat hunts using threat intelligence, environmental knowledge and observed attacker behaviours.
- Create, tune and validate monitoring use cases, correlation rules, queries, custom indicators and detection content to improve coverage and reduce false positives.
- Assess detection gaps identified during incidents and recommend enhancements to logging, telemetry, processes and security controls.
- Contribute to purple-team, penetration-testing and control-validation activities and ensure relevant findings are converted into actionable detection or response improvements.
Incident Response Capability and Governance:
- Develop, maintain and exercise incident response plans, standard operating procedures, playbooks, call-out arrangements and stakeholder communication templates.
- Conduct post-incident reviews and root-cause analysis, track lessons learned and ensure agreed corrective actions are assigned and monitored to closure.
- Contribute to incident response metrics, key risk indicators, trend analysis and control-effectiveness reporting for management and governance forums.
- Support cyber exercises and simulations to validate roles, escalation paths, communications and decision-making under realistic incident conditions.
- Keep current with emerging threats, vulnerabilities, attack methods and changes to relevant industry frameworks and regulatory expectations.
- Practical experience in cyber incident response, security monitoring or a Security Operations Centre environment.
- Hands‑on experience investigating security alerts and incidents using SIEM and EDR/XDR technologies.
- Experience analysing Windows and Linux host artefacts, authentication activity, security logs, network traffic and packet captures.
- Working knowledge of incident response lifecycle activities including preparation, detection, analysis, containment, eradication, recovery and lessons learned.
- Experience producing incident records, investigation reports, management updates and post‑incident findings.
- Understanding of attacker behaviours and frameworks including MITRE ATT&CK, Cyber Kill Chain and NIST incident response guidance.
- Knowledge of enterprise networking, identity and access management, cloud services, email security, endpoint security, vulnerability management and data loss prevention.
- Ability to manage multiple priorities, exercise sound judgement under pressure and communicate clearly with technical and senior stakeholders.
- Awareness of evidence handling, forensic integrity, confidentiality and regulatory considerations relevant to cyber investigations.