Cybersecurity Analyst

Overview

Title: Cybersecurity Analyst

W-2 Only (no 1099)

Must be a U.S. Citizen

Location: Lemont, IL

Company promotes the safe and secure use of technology and providing a variety of cybersecurity services including consultation, protection technologies, detection technologies, cybersecurity education and awareness, cybersecurity incident management, vulnerability management, compliance, and cybersecurity risk management.

Contract Position: Full Time, 40 hour work week

Period of Performance: 1 Year

Cybersecurity Analyst will play an important role to continuously monitor, triage alerts and tickets, investigate suspicious activity or poor configurations, and orchestrate responses to protect the laboratory s systems and data. Typical tasks may include:

• Resetting user passwords for cause (e.g., when they have been identified as being suspected compromised or  known compromised )
• Working with service owners to reset service account passwords for various reasons
• Ensuring authorize rs are designated for in-scope accounts
• Analyzing usage patterns for accounts (e.g., service, administrative) to identify inactive accounts or inappropriate account use
• Reviewing approval requests for various new access or accounts
• Triaging unusual access requests (e.g., access from 3 rd party VPN providers, impossible travel) or phishing reports
• Evaluate endpoint and detection response (EDR) installation and coverage.
• Identify systems without EDR and provide to IT teams for remediation.
• Monitoring external attack surface for unapproved systems, undocumented systems, and newly disclosed vulnerabilities
• Reviewing systems with existing public access to ensure requirements for these systems are followed (e.g., event logging, multifactor authentication)
• Attend online/Teams meetings with team and others as appropriate
• Work with team to provide status on current task, suggest improvements, discuss implementation, etc.

You will be expected to use a variety of tools to perform the above tasks, including Service Now, Crowd Strike, and Splunk

The ideal candidate will support the projects and tasks associated with the Cybersecurity Program.

Report to the Deputy Chief Information Security Officer within the Business & Information Services division; including daily guidance and collaboration with others in the Cyber Security Program Office (CSPO).

Typically, the work is performed remotely. For the candidate within driving distance of the Lab, there may be rare times to be onsite for in-person meetings, assessments, or presentations. Most of the Business Information Services (BIS) Division works remotely and are rarely onsite. If the candidate is out of state, too far away from the Lab, onsite meetings are not feasible to attend and not required.

A candidate is expected to:

• Analyze data and perform initial planning to address identified issues.
• Assist with the creation of playbooks to address identified issues.
• Seek to understand the intention of detections and corresponding playbooks.
• Execute various playbooks dealing with identified issues with minimal assistance (e.g., identification of compromised passwords, inappropriate use of administrative accounts, systems not providing event logs, systems without a functional EDR installed).

An improved candidate would also:

• Adapt on-the-fly when an existing playbook is insufficient.
• Provide basic feedback on playbooks and detections.
• Produce clear reports (MTTD/MTTR, FP rate, backlog) for technical and executive audiences; maintain thorough case notes.
• Recommend additional new use cases for detections based on an analysis of threats and data.
• Identify telemetry quality and visibility issues (SIEM parsing/normalization, EDR/XDR sensor health, asset/identity tagging).

An excellent candidate would also:

• Conduct proactive threat hunts; convert findings into new detections and control recommendations.
• Create advanced use cases for detections based on an analysis of threats and data, including sample criteria to identify the behavior and mapping detections to MITRE Telecommunication&CK
• Drive continuous improvements to existing processes or tooling.
• Perform quality reviews and improve handoffs/runbooks.
• Coach, guide, teach others on the team.
• Lead investigations end-to-end (triage to containment), delivering timelines, root cause, scope, IOCs, and impacted assets.
• Execute/coordinate containment and remediation (host isolation, credential resets, blocks) with proper approvals and verification.

• 1-3 years in a SOC, cybersecurity  blue team , or closely related role.
• Strong grasp of TCP/IP, OSI model, and common protocols (HTTP, DNS, SMTP). Windows/Linux/macOS fundamentals;
  Active Directory/Azure AD concepts; basic cloud logging.
• Experience with at least one SIEM and one EDR/XDR platform.
• Experience with ticketing/case management.
• Ability to craft queries using common languages; comfort with regex, JSON and APIs; basic scripting in Python/Power…