CISSP case studies
CISSP · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) is a vendor-neutral credential from ISC2 aimed at experienced security practitioners who design, engineer and manage an organization's overall security posture rather than administer a single product. It is commonly pursued by security managers, architects, analysts, auditors, consultants and directors, as well as IT leaders moving into security leadership. The CISSP case studies are 5 cases and about 4,320 words.
1The Claims Portal Exception Request
A regional health insurer (1,400 staff, 2.1 million member records) runs a claims portal that has been in production for nine years. Quantitative analysis puts the portal's annualized loss expectancy at 1.8M: a 30% annual likelihood of a breach with 6M impact.
602 words, about 3 min2Flat Plant Network, One Budget Line
A manufacturer operates a plant network with 40 programmable logic controllers, 12 engineering workstations, and a historian, all on a single flat VLAN shared with corporate desktops. A systems integrator and two equipment vendors share one VPN account with a static password to troubleshoot; their session logs are not collected.
850 words, about 4 min322,000 Accounts and Five Months
An insurer with 4,500 employees holds 22,000 accounts across 60 applications. Twenty applications are federated to the corporate identity provider; the other forty use local credentials with differing password policies.
926 words, about 5 min402:10 Saturday, 300 Endpoints Down
A retailer's distribution subsidiary is hit by ransomware at 02:10 on a Saturday. 300 of 1,100 endpoints and two of five file servers are encrypted; the ERP database server is intact, but its backups replicate hourly to a repository in the same site.
904 words, about 5 min538 Tickets, 40 Deploys a Day
An engineering organization has 140 repositories and a CI pipeline that builds 60 services. A critical vulnerability is published in a widely used JSON parsing library; 38 services depend on it, 12 of them transitively.
1,038 words, about 5 min