This case asks students to consider cybersecurity risks and their potential impact on the financial statements and to learn more about best practices for password policies to help mitigate cybersecurity threats. Students are asked to perform manual audit procedures on a sample of user names and passwords of employees of Liberty Data Systems to determine whether the passwords meet the best practice standards, and then automate these procedures using Alteryx or Python. Students are asked to determine if the sample passwords have been compromised utilizing a dictionary of nearly 2 million passwords discovered from data breaches of various organizations. Lastly, students are to document the next steps and any concerns for the audit based on their findings.
Suitable courses: Cybersecurity; Accounting information systems; Auditing (external or internal); Fraud; Data analytics