ICYB case studies

ICYB · Put your knowledge to work in context.

The ICYB is an entry-level cybersecurity certification aimed at people moving into defensive security roles or adding a security credential to an IT, networking, or help-desk background. Its published blueprint is broad rather than deep: threats and the current attack landscape, network and perimeter defense, identity and authentication, endpoint hardening, data protection and cryptography, security operations and incident response, risk and governance, and secure architecture including cloud and development practices. The ICYB case studies are 5 cases and about 4,548 words.

Flat Network at a 14-Branch Credit Union: Which Finding First?

You are the security lead at a regional credit union: 14 branches, 1,900 employees, one data center, and a /16 internal network that has never been segmented. One firewall pair separates the internet from a small DMZ; everything else - teller workstations, ATM management servers, the core banking system, and branch printers - shares the same flat address space.

876 words, about 4 min 2

Push-Bombing, Dormant Accounts, and a Domain-Admin Service Account

You are the security architect at a 480-person SaaS company. Employees authenticate to a cloud identity provider with a password plus push-based MFA.

871 words, about 4 min 3

Public Reporting Bucket: Is It a Breach, and What Do You Encrypt?

You are the privacy and security lead for a patient-scheduling SaaS used by 300 clinics, holding records for about 1.1 million patients in AWS us-east-1. Data at rest uses provider-managed SSE-S3.

989 words, about 5 min 4

Ransom Note on the Shop Floor: Containment at $180,000 an Hour

You are the on-call security manager at a manufacturer with two plants running a 24/7 line. At 21:40 the EDR console shows the same beaconing pattern on three servers: the MES application server that orchestrates the assembly line, the backup catalog server, and a file server holding 2 TB of engineering drawings.

897 words, about 4 min 5

Six Weeks to Launch: What Ships, What Waits, What Blocks

You are the first security hire at a 40-engineer startup six weeks from launching a B2B analytics product on AWS. Production, staging, and developer sandboxes all live in one account.

915 words, about 5 min