Google Cybersecurity case studies
Google Cybersecurity · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Google Cybersecurity Certificate is a fully online, self-paced career certificate delivered on Coursera and designed and built by subject-matter experts and senior practitioners at Google. It is aimed at people with no prior cybersecurity experience or degree who want an entry-level role such as cybersecurity analyst, security analyst, SOC analyst, information security analyst, IT security analyst, or cyber defense analyst. The curriculum is organized into eight courses, from Foundations of Cybersecurity through Put It to Work: Prepare for Cybersecurity Jobs, and the full program includes hands-on activities, quizzes and assignments, and regular assessments rather than a single published certification exam. Learners work with industry-standard tools including Python, Linux, SQL, Security Information and Event Management tools such as Chronicle and Splunk, the Suricata intrusion detection system, frameworks such as the NIST CSF, NIST RMF, and CIA Triad, and packet capture and analysis with tcpdump and Wireshark. The Google Cybersecurity case studies are 5 cases and about 4,070 words.
1The 9.8 That Isn't the Biggest Risk
Northwind Mutual is a regional insurer with 800 employees and a six-person security team. Its annual security budget is $250,000, and internal audit just delivered 12 findings.
778 words, about 4 min2Sixty Flat Networks and One Curious Contractor
FreshMart operates 60 small grocery stores. Each store runs a flat /24 network: six point-of-sale terminals, four back-office PCs, eight IP cameras with factory-default credentials, and guest Wi-Fi - all on the same Layer 2 segment with no ACLs.
776 words, about 4 min3Nine Thousand Vulnerabilities, Two Analysts
Riverside Health scans 1,400 assets monthly; the latest report lists 9,100 vulnerabilities. Two analysts and one monthly patch window are available.
858 words, about 4 min4Eleven Days of Silence in the SIEM
Your team of three analysts handles a SIEM that fires about 1,200 alerts a day. A rule for 'multiple failed logons' produces roughly 900 of them, almost all from service accounts and one misconfigured backup job.
807 words, about 4 min5The Script That Blocked the Security Team
A junior analyst on your team wrote a Python script that reads /var/log/auth.log every five minutes, extracts source IPs of failed SSH logins, and calls a firewall API to block them. It runs as root via cron on the SIEM server.
851 words, about 4 min