GISP case studies
GISP · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The GIAC Information Security Professional (GISP) is a practitioner-level certification from GIAC, an ISO/IEC 17024 personnel certification body accredited through ANAB. GIAC positions GISP as a pragmatic alternative to the CISSP, signaling broad security domain fluency validated by a respected provider. The exam validates a practitioner's understanding of the eight cybersecurity domains as determined by ISC2 that form a critical part of the CISSP exam: security and risk management, asset security, security architecture and engineering, communication and network security, identity and access management, security assessment and testing, security operations, and software development security. GISP is aimed at security professionals who want to understand the concepts covered in the CISSP exam as determined by ISC2, along with system administrators, security administrators, network administrators, and security managers. The GISP case studies are 5 cases and about 2,635 words.
1The Unpatchable MRI Workstation
Northbridge Regional Health is a 240-bed hospital. Its MRI suite runs a vendor-controlled Windows 7 embedded workstation that cannot be patched; the vendor says remediation is bundled with a 1.8 million scanner replacement scheduled in 18 months.
625 words, about 3 min2Legal Hold Versus Privacy Minimization in SaaS
Helio Analytics is a 600-person SaaS company with a four-tier data classification policy: Public, Internal, Confidential, and Restricted. A discovery exercise across sanctioned and unsanctioned SaaS found 4,300 files in collaboration workspaces.
539 words, about 3 min3Segmentation and FIPS in a Live Factory
Vantage Fabrication operates a plant with a flat /16 OT network. Fourteen legacy PLCs run a proprietary broadcast protocol; a safety instrumented system shares the same switches as the historian and the enterprise IT uplink.
515 words, about 3 min4Two Identity Providers After an Acquisition
Cobalt Systems acquires Lumen Robotics. Cobalt uses Okta with SAML for 1,400 employees; Lumen uses AD FS with 900 contractors and 300 employees.
474 words, about 2 min5DNS Beacons Across 320 Stores
Meridian Retail operates 320 stores and 8,000 endpoints. The DNS logging pipeline shows 200–400 queries per day to high-entropy subdomains of a single domain, with TXT responses up to 4 KB.
482 words, about 2 min