CSIS case studies
CSIS · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Certified Information Security Specialist (CSIS) is a vendor-neutral, multiple-choice credential aimed at practitioners who need breadth across the security discipline rather than depth in a single product. It suits security analysts, administrators, auditors and IT generalists moving into a dedicated security role, as well as managers who must evaluate technical decisions without making them. The CSIS case studies are 5 cases and about 5,785 words.
1The Vendor Exception Nobody Wants to Sign
Northwind Mutual (about 900 staff) runs a claims-processing integration with a third-party administrator. The link is SFTP over a site-to-site VPN using one shared account, xfer claims , whose password sits in a plaintext config file on two application servers and has not changed since 2019.
1,065 words, about 5 min2Three Findings, One Quarter's Budget
Helio Systems (400 employees, 60 contractors) consolidated onto one identity provider last year. The quarterly access review closed with a 78% approval rate in under three days.
1,114 words, about 6 min3One Key, Four Years, Seven Years of Tape
Cobalt Health Analytics stores records for 1,400 tenant clinics in a single Postgres cluster. The application encrypts sensitive columns with AES-256-GCM using one 256-bit key, injected as an environment variable in the deployment manifest and present in the infrastructure repository's Git history.
1,162 words, about 6 min402:14 on a Saturday
At 02:14 on a Saturday, EDR on FS-03 - a 2 TB file server serving 300 users at a 24/7 distribution warehouse - flags a process writing and renaming files with .lkd extensions across three shares. The SOC is two analysts on call.
1,224 words, about 6 min5Twelve Records, One Bug Bounty, Four Partners
A bug bounty report arrives for a telehealth API. GET /v2/patients/{id} returns the full record when the caller presents any valid OAuth token issued to the patient portal; the handler verifies a token exists but never that its subject may access that patient.
1,220 words, about 6 min