Inside SOC Operations: Detection Rules, Playbooks, and the Operational Discipline That Makes a SOC Work
The gap between security tools and security operations
Every organization with M365 E5 has Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, and access to Sentinel. The tools are deployed. The default alerts are firing. And in most organizations, those alerts are either ignored (nobody has time to investigate 400 medium-severity alerts per day), auto-closed (the previous analyst got tired of the same false positive), or escalated to a managed SOC provider who lacks the context to make good triage decisions.
The problem is not tools. The problem is operations — the processes, procedures, and decision frameworks that turn alert data into security outcomes. A Defender for Endpoint alert that says “suspicious process execution detected” is not useful on its own. The SOC needs: a triage procedure that determines whether this specific alert requires investigation, a classification framework that categorizes the alert against known attack patterns, an investigation playbook that guides the analyst through evidence collection, and an escalation path that gets the right people involved at the right time.
SOC Operations teaches the operational discipline that transforms security tooling into functioning security operations. The 13 modules cover the complete SOC lifecycle — from the first alert through triage, classification, investigation, containment, recovery, and post-incident improvement.
What’s in the course
Detection engineering (Modules 3-6). 28 production-ready detection rules mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, each with the KQL analytics rule, the expected false positive rate, the tuning parameters, and the investigation procedure that fires when the rule triggers. These are not example rules — they are deployable rules with documented blast radius, tested in a production M365 environment. Detection categories cover credential attacks, email threats, endpoint compromise, persistence mechanisms, lateral movement, and data exfiltration.
Investigation playbooks (Modules 7-9). Three complete investigation playbooks: AiTM credential phishing, business email compromise, and ransomware pre-encryption. Each playbook follows the investigation from alert through evidence collection through containment through reporting. The playbooks are structured documents — not flowcharts — with specific tool commands, KQL queries, and decision points at each stage.
IR integration (Modules 10-11). Four IR report templates: the technical investigation report, the executive summary, the regulatory notification assessment, and the post-incident lessons learned. These templates connect directly to the Practical IR course (IR17) and the Practical GRC course (G9 breach notification, G14 regulatory notification).
Hardening and prevention (Module 12). 45 hardening controls across identity (Entra ID conditional access, MFA enforcement), email (Defender for Office 365 anti-phishing, DMARC enforcement), endpoint (attack surface reduction rules, application control), and cloud (Defender for Cloud Apps policies, information protection). Each control includes the configuration procedure, the security improvement, and the operational impact on users.
The operational deliverables
The course produces 5 automation templates that integrate with Sentinel playbooks (Logic Apps) for automated response actions: identity containment (revoke sessions + disable account), email quarantine (purge phishing emails from all recipient mailboxes), endpoint isolation (Defender for Endpoint network containment), alert enrichment (automatic GeoIP and threat intelligence lookup), and notification (automated Slack/Teams alert to the IR channel).
Who it’s for
SOC analysts building operational maturity. Security managers designing SOC processes. IR practitioners who need detection rules that feed their investigation pipeline. The course assumes familiarity with M365 security tools (Module 1 of M365 Security Operations provides this) and basic KQL (Module 2 of M365 SecOps or Modules 1-4 of Mastering KQL).
The 13 modules contain 167,378 words across 520 pages. All modules are in the paid tier.