Juliana's story: Attention to detail

This is the second reading in the scenario about Juliana Soto, a cybersecurity analyst who was recently hired by Right-On-Time Payment Solutions. In the reading about asset protection

, Juliana identified important assets to her organization and came up with a plan for how to protect them. In this reading, you will review how Juliana used her company’s escalation policy and her attention to detail to deal with security issues she encountered on the job. 

Focus on the details

As she prepares to go into the office this morning, Juliana reflects on the previous day’s accomplishments: 

• Read through company information to learn about the most important assets she is tasked with protecting

• Learned that her company deals with PII data from customers

• Put together an information security lifecycle strategy for the organization’s data

• Began monitoring security systems on her work laptop

It was an exciting first day full of new information for Juliana! She wonders what today will bring.

Juliana is at her desk monitoring data logs and responding to emails. Suddenly, her system alerts her of suspicious log activity. It appears that an employee’s account has been locked due to 10 failed login attempts. She finds this concerning because the escalation policy states that 10 failed login attempts should be escalated to the password protection team.  

Juliana is excited about her first chance to escalate a security event. As she prepares to go through the escalation process, she is suddenly alerted to another event that has happened. She clicks on the alert and learns that an unknown source has attempted to compromise a system that stores bank account information for the company’s customers. She views this as a major concern. She recalls the importance of sensitive financial information from her previous security training. She learned the previous day that her company stores a large amount of sensitive customer data. Hundreds of customers will be impacted if a system storing this kind of important data is compromised. 

Juliana decides that the unknown source attempting to compromise the system that stores the bank information of customers is the more urgent of the two events and needs to be handled immediately. She references the company’s escalation policy to find the best way to handle the escalation process for this type of incident. 

Juliana carefully follows the process outlined in the escalation policy, making sure to be attentive to all of the details in the process. This allows her to notify the appropriate team members of what has happened. She completes all the steps outlined in the escalation policy for an event dealing with customer PII. 

Next, she decides to escalate the lower-priority event. Once again, she follows the company guidelines to escalate that event. 

Juliana’s supervisor is impressed with her initiative and ability to follow the escalation guidelines. Juliana is off to a great start in her security career!

Key takeaways

Attention to detail is important for an entry-level security analyst. It helps the analyst monitor data logs and effectively follow an escalation policy. It’s also critical for the analyst to recognize what assets are most important to an organization. This helps the analyst prioritize how quickly certain incidents should be escalated.