Derek Ballard

About Derek Ballard

Experienced Security Operations Center (SOC) Analyst with over 7 years of extensive…

Experience

1. Soc Analyst

   Cytellix

   Jul 2023 — Present

   Responded, prioritized, and analyzed security events/threats using EDR/XDR systems such as Carbon Black, Sentinel One, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender, and IBM QRadar.• Conducted fast-paced containment and remediation Incident Response actions including sessiontermination, password resets, device quarantine, and account disabling.• Created verbose incident tickets for prompt client communication and response recommendations.• Analyzed various on-premise and Cloud logs, including Checkpoint Firewall, Windows Security Event Logs, Iboss, AWS VPC CloudTrail, and others.• Articulately conveyed complex technical information to delivery teams, executives, and non-technical clients through written and verbal communication.• Leveraged Identity Security Products (IAM) and sandboxing to validate processes, including O365, by correlating Microsoft Entra with user events such as MFA and network baselines.• Conducted research on emerging threats, producing actionable \"Threat Activity Reports\" to increase customer protection and stay current with latest adversary tactics and techniques.• Conducted threat hunting in logs utilizing OSINT, public IoCs, and other technical parameters.• Applied analytical and problem-solving skills by submitting internal \"Change Requests\" for detection rules, reducing misconfigurations, analyst fatigue, and false positives by 25%• Initiated, configured, and executed scheduled vulnerability scans using Tenable Nessus