Forum Discussion
Subject: Practice Lab Recommendations – NHS England Cyber Security Assessment
Hi there,
Not sure if you've done the assessment already. If so, I hope it went well!
If not, please see the recommendation below.
To prepare for your NHS England CSOC assessment using Immersive Labs, here are recommendations for similar content you should look for.
Microsoft Sentinel Blue Team Ops
Search for the "Microsoft Sentinel Blue Team Ops" collection name. It provides hands-on exercises for SIEM operations, configuring detection mechanisms, and conducting incident investigations. Also, look for the "Kusto Query Language (KQL)" collection. This dedicated collection is critical because Sentinel threat hunting and analytics rules rely entirely on KQL, so you need to be comfortable filtering, aggregating, and extracting log data.
Microsoft Azure Basics: Logic Apps The "Azure Basics" collection will get you comfortable with configuring and managing resources within the Azure web portal. Next, search for "Microsoft Sentinel: Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)". This series is highly relevant for the Logic Apps requirement. It teaches you how to build automated workflows, configure triggers and conditions, and create SOAR playbooks to automatically enrich incidents or contain threats.
Privilege Escalation Through IAM
Look for "AWS IAM & Cloud Security Labs" for foundational labs covering AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). These will solidify your understanding of JSON-based IAM policies, resource scoping, and the principle of least privilege. Then, search for "AWS Privilege Escalation" to find dedicated privilege escalation scenarios within the AWS or Cloud Security paths. These labs demonstrate how attackers abuse over-permissive IAM roles to escalate access, which will help you identify those same risks defensively.
Web Log Analysis Using Linux CLI
Immersive Labs has a dedicated "Web Log Analysis Series". Pay special attention to "Web Log Analysis: Ep. 5 - Searching Web Server Logs using Linux CLI". This specific lab focuses on filtering access logs to find unique IP addresses and HTTP status codes using combinations of grep, awk, sort, and uniq. If you need a refresher on piping data between commands or extracting specific columns, the broader "Linux CLI Series" episodes will help you build foundational text-manipulation speed.
Hope that helps!