ankit dagar

I've been in cybersecurity for about 5 years now, mostly on the SOC/SIEM side, and over the last couple of years I've really specialized in Palo Alto Cortex XSIAM, that's kind of become my thing.

Started off as a SOC Analyst at Coforge working on a UK media and entertainment client. Basic stuff at first, monitoring alerts round the clock through QRadar and Microsoft Defender, chasing down phishing/email threats using tools like Mimecast, VirusTotal, URLScan. Good grounding in how a SOC actually runs day to day.

Then I moved to IBM and things picked up. I was leading incident response onsite for a while, handling triage, containment, RCA, writing up SOPs based on NIST and MITRE ATT&CK, tuning correlation rules to cut down the noise from false positives. Also did a lot of QRadar integration work during that time.

Right now I'm doing Cortex XSIAM admin work onsite, which is honestly the part I enjoy most. I basically own the onboarding of data sources into XSIAM, API, syslog, Broker VM, agents, file-based, all of it, plus parser validation, writing XQL queries for investigations and dashboards, building out detection use cases, deploying XDR agents across Windows and Linux boxes, and automating a bunch of SOC workflows through XSIAM playbooks tied into ServiceNow. I've done this across banking, automotive, and real estate clients, so I've had to get comfortable with different compliance requirements too — RBI, SEBI, ISO 27001.

A few things I'm genuinely proud of: got 4 spot awards in one year from both the client and IBM, was top performer two quarters running, and got a shoutout from IBM India leadership for how I handled things during the CrowdStrike outage last June. Also did a fair bit of work strengthening our monitoring during the whole INDO-PAK cyber campaign period (Operation Sindoor).

Looking forward, I want to keep growing in the XSIAM/XDR space — SIEM engineering, detection engineering, maybe SOC leadership eventually. Happy to work remote, but open to relocating for the right role.

Did my B.Tech in Computer Science from Manav Rachna University. Speak English and Hindi fluently, still working on my Spanish.