Cybersecurity Threat Hunter and Forensic Analyst

Overview

With over 18,000 employees worldwide, the Microsoft Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is responsible for the strategy, design, and implementation of Microsoft’s end-to-end customer experience. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers come to us not only because we provide industry-leading products and services, but also because we provide a differentiated and connected customer experience.

The Global Customer Success (GCS) organization is leading the effort to create the desired customer experience through support offer creation, driving digital transformation across our tools, and delivering operational excellence across CE&S.

The Microsoft Detection and Response team (DART) is hiring for a Cybersecurity Threat Hunter and Forensic Analyst. This position will be a vital individual contributor role on the DART Team in taking the lead in threat hunting and forensics in delivery of cybersecurity investigations for our customers. You will work in a fast-paced, intellectually intense, service-oriented environment where collaboration and speed are key to our investigations.

This role is flexible in that you can work up to 100% from home.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

Conducting Research

• Identifies, conducts, and supports others in conducting research into critical security areas, such as competitor products, current attacks, adversary tracking, and academic literature. Partners cross-functionally (e.g., across disciplines, teams, or security versus non-security) to design solutions to prevent attacks. Designs lead to engineering projects. Investigates business critical security issues (e.g., root cause, motivation, and impact). Advocates priorities. Elevates findings appropriately to address and mitigate issues. Solicits feedback and evaluates results to incorporate into future research. Demonstrates judgment in identifying projects and priorities (e.g., what to test and pursue). Understands interplay across Microsoft technologies and how they give rise to attacker opportunities.
• Works with others to synthesize research findings into recommendations for mitigation of security issues. Shares across teams. Drives change within team based on research findings. Contributes to professional community through publications.
• Analyzes complex issues using multiple data sources to develop insights and identify security problems and threats. Creates new solutions to mitigate security issues. Makes tradeoffs to balance security and operational needs. Identifies and recommends process improvements and adopts best practices. Leverages the work of others to improve existing processes. Helps to drive resolution to systemic security issues through cross-team collaboration. Anticipates previously unknown potential artifacts that could be present in data as indicators of attacker activity. Drives cross-team collaboration. May contribute to professional community through conference and forum presentations.
• Recommends prioritization and validation methods for technical indicators. Synthesizes threat data to generate trends, patterns and insights that align to intelligence requirements or customer requests. Reviews findings and identifies nuanced variants. Develops tools to automate analyses.
• Leads efforts to clean, structure, and standardize data and data sources. Leads data quality efforts to ensure timely and consistent access to data sources. Curates sources of data and partners to develop and sustain data access across teams. Incorporates new data sources consistent with corporate data privacy standard.
• Takes product schedules, dependencies and risk assessments into consideration in performing security design and analysis. Creates a schedule for analysis of large feature areas that accounts for dependencies and meets milestones. Creates schedule for a security analysis that involves several stakeholders and that optimizes their time and effort. Conducts Security Research of Microsoft and competitor products. Researches, analyzes, and summarizes security threats and shares with security assurance and security tooling teams as enhancements to security compliance program.
• Identifies, prioritizes, and targets complex security issues that cause negative impact to customers. Creates and drives adoption of relevant mitigations. Suggests and drives appropriate guidance, models, response, and remediation for issues. Drives program and process of mitigation (e.g., automation).

Solution Generation

• Identifies, prioritizes, and targets complex security issues that cause negative impact to customers. Creates and drives adoption of relevant mitigations. Suggests and drives appropriate guidance, models, response, and remediation for issues. Drives program and process of mitigation (e.g., automation).
• Solves classes of issues systematically and with transparency to customers in technical implementation and automation of solutions related to specific kinds of security issues (e.g., signature detection, malware, threat analysis, reverse engineering). Begins to develop substantial skills in other kinds of security issues outside areas of expertise. Works across disciplines to build improvements in solutions and methods. Uses results from research and experimentation to drive architecture or product direction for Microsoft.
• Engages with customers and partners to improve security issues. Analyzes security issus or patterns. Advocates for customers and partners. Develops feedback channels and translates feedback into better security practices. Escalates issues as needed. Fosters adoption of security features (e.g., multi-factor authentication [MFA]). Develops and provides guidance and education that result from resolution of security issues.

Orchestration

• Helps to make connections and assist in developing agreements between groups to clarify priorities and identify dependencies. Provides coordination across groups. Articulates key security issues to teams and to upper management. Autonomously drives coordination and collaboration across teams. Participates in internal or external collaboration in representing Microsoft''s interests.
• Protects tools, techniques, information, and results of security practices. Assesses efficacy of operational security (e.g., red-on-red pen testing). Develops new techniques to evaluate operational security. Teaches others to master techniques.
• Effectively manages multiple workstreams and resources during incidents, applies diagnostic expertise, provides guidance to other engineers working to mitigate and resolve issues, and maintains a commitment to the quality of products and services throughout the lifecycle. Ensures proper notes from incidents are documented and drives the execution of quality postmortem and root cause analysis processes across teams. Performs analysis of historical incident data to identify trends, patterns, and issues that should be addressed at high priority.
• Leads large-scale security reviews. Leads work on architectural and design security reviews for feature areas. Where appropriate, ensures best practices for security architecture, design and development are in place. Measures return on investment (ROI). Determines value of investment. Measures customer satisfaction. Evaluates security risks and their impact to the affected services and works with Dev. Ops leads, engineering leads and researchers to mitigate risks. Monitors and responds to security events, potential vulnerabilities, exposures, and policy compliance issues.

Industry Leadership

• Uses subject matter expertise to identify potential security issues, tools, mitigations, and processes (e.g., architecture, failure modes, attack chain, threat modeling, vulnerabilities). Stays current in knowledge and expertise as security landscape evolves. Makes expertise available to others and drives change through sharing, coaching, conferences, and other means. Coaches and mentors others in area of expertise. Models appropriate risk taking and ethical behavior.
• Uses business knowledge and technical expertise to assist with analyzing the work of the team to identify potential tools to assist future vulnerability analyses. Helps define deployment best practices and security configuration standards to ensure technologies are deployed in a secure fashion. Researches and maintains deep knowledge of industry trends, technologies, tools, securities, and advances.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field
• In-depth knowledge of one or more of the following disciplines:
• Windows forensics and an understanding of how to leverage forensic artifacts (Event Logs, Prefetch, Shimcache, Amcache, ShellBags, etc.) to answer key investigative questions
• Knowledge of Windows memory forensics, Linux, and/or macOS forensics is a plus
• Cloud forensics, and the ability to investigate security incidents using the Microsoft product stack
• Experience investigating identity-based attacks
• Knowledge of third-party cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, etc. is a plus
• Threat Hunting, and taking a proactive approach to identifying threats
• Knowledge of threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs)
• Ability to identify anomalies in a given dataset
• Ability to correlate data from disparate data sources
• Attention to detail and an investigative mindsetAbility to contextualize and prioritize findings to put together a comprehensive account and briefing of the events that transpired during a security incident
• Advanced technical writing and storytelling skills. Able to pull together multiple disparate events to build and communicate a cohesive timeline of activity.
• Champion of continuous documentation of technical findings and ongoing investigation threads for fellow team members and key external stakeholders
• Excellent written and oral presentation skills, with the ability to convey complex topics to non-technical audiences
• Understanding of security products within an IT environment in multiple layers of the security stack (Antivirus, EDR, IDPS, proxy, firewall, VPN, email, etc.)
• Advanced usage of Microsoft Office, specifically PowerPoint, Excel, and Word

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• 6+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection OR Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field
• Coding/scripting experience
• Experience with third-party security products, including but not limited to, Splunk, CrowdStrike Falcon, QRadar, etc.
• Experience with Kusto Query Language (KQL)
• Familiarity with MITRE ATT&CK framework
• Experience with malware analysis
• Experience with the intelligence cycle, and generating threat intelligence from investigative findings
• Experience performing large scale investigations of advanced adversaries
• Published research (blogs, presentations, etc) on novel threat actor TTPs
• Mentorship of junior investigators

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and / or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire / transfer and every two years thereafter.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.