Tier 1 SOC Analyst Interview Experience

The author of the post underwent an interview for a tier 1 SOC analyst position and was questioned on various technical topics such as attacks and mitigations in Active Directory, comparisons between VirtualBox, Hyper-V, and VMware, explanations of WAF, PROXY, IDS/IPS, and FIREWALL, malware analysis (static vs dynamic), SIEM solutions like Splunk and QRadar, as well as their ranking on TryHackMe and CyberDefenders. The author wonders if these questions are normal for a beginner candidate, as they found them difficult.