Security Operations & Incident Response Certification
Detect, triage and respond to security incidents like a blue team
Key facts
- Level: Professional
- Field: Cybersecurity & Information Security
- Estimated study time: about 30 hours
- Credential price: $149
- Exam: 60 questions · 90 minutes · pass mark 75%
About the Security Operations & Incident Response certification
The Security Operations & Incident Response certification validates that you can operate inside a modern Security Operations Center (SOC) and lead an incident from first alert to lessons learned. It is a blue-team credential built around how defenders actually work: collecting and correlating telemetry, triaging alerts, hunting threats and running the incident-response lifecycle under pressure. You will master the SOC mission and tier model, SIEM engineering (log collection, correlation, use cases and tuning), EDR/XDR detection and response, and the full NIST incident-response lifecycle — preparation, detection & analysis, containment, eradication, recovery and lessons learned. The exam covers the cyber kill chain and MITRE ATT&CK as detection frameworks, threat intelligence and IOCs, log sources and analysis, detection engineering, alert triage and false-positive management, digital-forensics fundamentals (evidence handling, chain of custody, memory and disk), malware-analysis concepts, threat hunting hypotheses, vulnerability management, security metrics (MTTD/MTTR), playbooks and SOAR automation, and incident communication and escalation. It is tool-agnostic: the tradecraft transfers across Splunk, Sentinel, Elastic, CrowdStrike, Defender and the rest. Candidates should already hold the Network Security & Defense credential or equivalent hands-on experience.
What you will learn
The official Security Operations & Incident Response study course covers:
- The SOC & the SIEM — How a Security Operations Center is structured and how a SIEM turns raw logs into detections.
- Detection Engineering & Triage — Building high-fidelity detections, then triaging alerts with enrichment and prioritization.
- The Incident Response Lifecycle — The NIST six-phase lifecycle from preparation through lessons learned, plus communication and escalation.
- Kill Chain, ATT&CK & Threat Intelligence — Modeling intrusions with the kill chain and ATT&CK, and operationalizing threat intel and IOCs.
- Forensics, Hunting & Metrics — Digital-forensics fundamentals, proactive threat hunting, vulnerability management and SOC metrics.
- Hands-on Lab — Run a SOC: Detect, Triage & Hunt — A SOC capstone in Google Colab: normalize logs into a SIEM view, write detection rules that fire on real attack patterns, triage alerts and run the i…
Prerequisites
Frequently asked questions
- Is the Security Operations & Incident Response certificate verifiable?
- Yes. Every issued Hootix Academy certificate carries a unique credential code that anyone can verify online.
- How is the Security Operations & Incident Response exam structured?
- It is a 90-minute proctored multiple-choice exam of 60 questions; you need 75% to pass.
- Do I need to buy the course to take the exam?
- You can purchase the certification exam on its own, or bundle it with the full study course at a reduced price.
- How long does the Security Operations & Incident Response course take?
- About 30 hours of self-paced study.