A Day in the Life of a CISO: An Employee Email Discovered in a Password Dump

The notification lands in my SecurityScorecard dashboard just as I’m wrapping up a meeting. An employee’s email address has shown up in a password dump on a dark web monitoring feed. Another day, another reminder of why cybersecurity is a full-contact sport.

I immediately pull up the alert details. Still, I know better than to assume. My first step is to escalate the alert internally by assigning a remediation ticket in SecurityScorecard, synced directly to our IT team’s JIRA queue. Next, I drill down into my organization’s Scorecard to view credentials at risk. I check if this individual’s credentials have surfaced in any other dumps or if there’s unusual account activity. Everything else looks clean, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. I trigger a forced password reset for the employee’s account and add a note in the platform to track the resolution process.

While IT works on remediation, I leverage the incident as a teachable moment. Within minutes, I deploy a tailored security awareness training module to the entire department, emphasizing the risks of password reuse and credential stuffing. It’s an opportunity to reinforce good habits while the event is fresh in everyone’s minds.

Finally, I prep a brief update for our leadership team, explaining the situation, the steps we’ve taken, and why our proactive monitoring saved us here. They appreciate that the issue didn’t escalate into a larger breach, and I take a moment to reflect on how much easier SecurityScorecard makes these situations to manage.

As I close the loop, I make a mental note to review the employee’s critical systems access during our next risk assessment. It’s all part of staying one step ahead in this ever-changing game.

Just another day in the life of a CISO—staying vigilant, tackling threats head-on, and leaning on SecurityScorecard’s tools to keep the organization safe.

Does this sound like your day? If not, contact us for a demo and to learn more about SecurityScorecard.