CCST Cybersecurity case studies
CCST Cybersecurity · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Cisco Certified Support Technician (CCST) Cybersecurity is an entry-level Cisco credential aimed at people preparing for a first job in IT support or security operations, and at students coming out of networking academy or self-study programs. It validates that a candidate can talk about security in practical, day-to-day terms rather than at a specialist depth. The CCST Cybersecurity case studies are 5 cases and about 4,121 words.
1The Partners Who Say They Are Too Small to Be a Target
A 60-person accounting firm has three partners who are also the entire IT decision committee. Findings from a recent internal review: (1) all 60 staff are local administrators on their laptops because installing printers 'takes too long'; (2) eight billing staff share one 'Finance' login to the billing application, and the vendor quotes $4,200 plus three weeks to convert to named users; (3) the office manager keeps a spreadsheet of all passwords, including the domain administrator account, on a share readable by Everyone; (4) no one has reviewed file share permissions since 2019, so the 'Public' share contains payroll exports.
799 words, about 4 min2Guest Wi-Fi Reached the ERP Database in Four Minutes
A 40-person logistics company runs everything on one flat 192.168.10.0/24 network behind a single edge firewall: the ERP and database server, an FTP server that three retail partners use to drop EDI order files, 60 IP cameras, warehouse handheld scanners on Wi-Fi, and guest Wi-Fi that shares the staff DHCP scope. During a penetration test, the tester joined guest Wi-Fi, received 192.168.10.87, and reached the ERP database on TCP 1433 within four minutes.
813 words, about 4 min3EDR in Monitor Mode, an EOL Line, and a Windows 7 Instrument
A 150-person manufacturer runs Windows 10 and 11 laptops, a few Macs, and an EDR agent that has been in 'monitor only' mode for six months because the previous administrator feared false positives blocking production tooling. Forty machines remain on Windows 10 21H2 because an update broke a line-of-business application last year.
856 words, about 4 min4CVSS 9.8 Internally Versus CVSS 7.5 on the Internet
A quarterly authenticated scan of a 300-asset environment returns 312 findings: 9 critical, 47 high, and 256 medium or low. Policy states that critical findings must be remediated within 14 days.
854 words, about 4 min5Twelve Calls in Fifteen Minutes
At 07:10 on Monday, the helpdesk at a 120-person insurance brokerage takes 12 calls in 15 minutes: users cannot open documents, and filenames now end in .locked. A text file on the file server points to a Tor payment page.
799 words, about 4 min