Cyber Security Specialist: Blue Team, ITS, Cape Town at Woolworths

Introduction

• We are searching for an energetic, output-driven Blue Team Ninja to support the execution of the cyber security strategy and roadmap with a primary focus on blue and purple teaming. You’ll be assisting the blue team in their efforts to defend the Woolworths galaxy against various cyber empire threats. You’ll work closely with the rest of the Cyber team, IT GRC, and partners across the Group to continually improve our security posture, plus supporting and transforming our SOC capabilities by coordinating operational tasks and delivering key programs. This is a technical role requiring experience in building, delivering, improving, and validating defensive processes, solutions, and tooling. The role also requires good people skills to effectively interact and communicate with various stakeholders across the Woolworths galaxy. This is a junior-level permanent position based at the Head Office in Cape Town.

Job description

•  Incident response – identify and respond to security incidents, including containment and investigation. 
•  Maintaining and enhancing existing and new toolsets (like XDR) required for mature active defence. Investigate new approaches, technology, and automation to challenge traditional thinking and raise the level of security.
•  Mature the security S.H.I.E.L.D – enable mature active defence processes through continual validation and verification of infrastructure, platform, applications, and data asset controls.
•  Enhance defence continuously – work with the team to update defence capabilities in line with threats, vulnerabilities and exploits identified during red teaming and threat hunting. Automating trumping manual. 
•  Manage threat intelligence – contribute towards building and running threat intelligence capabilities.
•  Hunt for the needle in the needle stack - proactively search for and identify advanced threats that evade existing security solutions and feed this learning into blue team defence capability.
•  Blue team reporting and metrics – assist with building and maturing blue team reporting mechanisms such as dashboards and key cyber metrics.  
•  Establish relationships with key stakeholders for effective cross-team collaboration and implementation of security operations processes.

Additional Responsibilities

•  Supporting the broader Cyber SecOpsTeam – collaboration to drive and support various operational and strategic initiatives.
•  Champion or co-champion internal security solutions and/or processes.
•  Help define and set security standards.
•  Provide context and guidance to implement security improvements.

Minimum requirements

Mandatory

•  Minimum of 4 years hands on practical experience working in cyber security operations with the focus on incident response and blue teaming.
•  Experience with security technologies and processes covering identity & access management, data security, vulnerability management and general infrastructure (network, platform, cloud, and endpoint) security.
•  Experience in defence tools such as EDR, Microsoft and SIEM.

Advantageous

•  Relevant blue team and incident response qualifications and certifications such as SANS – Cyber Defence and CREST – Incident Response.
•  Experience with attack tools such as Burp Suite, Cobalt Strike and Metasploit.

Additional Criteria

•  Some people skills to engage with the various stakeholders across the business.
•  Deep technical skills and ability to automate manual processes.
•  Practical scripting experience
•  Working with data (flows, integration, correlation and visualisation).
•  Bloodhound approach to security.
•  Relentless pursuit of threat identification and remediation.
•  Relevant research and translation into defence.
•  Ability to perform malware analysis.
•  Ability to engage with and contribute to the Information Security community.
•  Ability to play in the Matrix
•  Knowledge of Woolworths IT and cyber security landscape, including systemic understanding of key business linkages and dependencies 
•  Is aware of and responsive to internal and external events and influences on the technical landscape 
•  Ability to research technology-related concepts, trends, and best practices, and apply findings
•  Appropriately derives and organises the essence of information to draw solid conclusions
•  Looks beyond symptoms to uncover root causes of problems to be solved
•  Synthesises data from different sources to identify trends
•  Presents problem analysis and a recommended solution rather than just identifying and describing the problem itself
•  Proactively approaches others to obtain missing information 
•  Demonstrates a results-oriented mindset in planning and implementing activities/projects 
•  Clearly defines objectives and translates them into workable activities
•  Monitors and tracks progress to ensure delivery of all planned commitments, and keeps the appropriate people informed
•  Prepares written reports and briefs and communicates ideas clearly
•  Speaks fluently in team meetings when presenting information
•  Manages existing partnerships within established agreements or contracts; negotiates adjustments when mutually beneficial to do so
•  Genuinely cultivates personal bonds with colleagues in order to enhance performance throughout the organisation
•  Adjusts to work effectively within new work structures, processes, requirements, or cultures
•  Demonstrates resourcefulness in acquiring necessary knowledge, skills and competencies to adapt to change