For those who joined a cyber unit recently, what did day one look like? I’ve been doing authorized threat emulation and blue‑team hardening on a brigade TOC this fall with Zeek, Suricata, and Elastic, and I’m trying to gauge how much a new accession really spends ‑on defense — phish triage, lateral‑movement hunts, playbook reps — versus admin and briefings.
and I’m trying to gauge how much a new accession really spends ‑on defense — Agree on the split: day one was about 30% defense, 70% ugh admin (CAC/SIPR/IAM and briefings). Once accounts were live, I pulled yesterday’s Suricata alerts in Elastic and paired with the on-call to triage phish and do a quick lateral-movement hunt — your Zeek work will slot right in. Concrete step: show up with an access checklist and ask to shadow the on-call for 1–2 shifts — are you headed to a brigade DCO team or an MDT?
My take: I’d lean toward the simplest next step and see if it changes anything this week — if not, you’ve got a clear case to escalate. What would block you from trying that?
Quick example: I showed up with JSON exports for a Zeek notices dashboard and a couple Elastic/Kibana pivots, so as soon as my roles propagated I could run a ‘lateral-movement’ sweep on SMB sessions and brief a finding while the IAM queue crawled. If you’ve got similar Zeek/Suricata queries from your brigade TOC work, @OP, bring them day one and ask the SOC lead for a 15‑min window to import and run them. Caveat: some shops won’t mirror traffic to you immediately, so have a concise phish triage checklist ready as a fallback.