Course Description for Introduction to Cybersecurity
The overarching goal of the course is to introduce the foundational concepts, principles, and tools of cybersecurity. This course’s primary purpose functions as a survey of major topics in the cybersecurity field and presents a range of interrelated industry vocabulary, tools, frameworks, and methodologies. The course emphasizes security integration, application of cybersecurity practices and devices, ethics, and best practices management.
Course Outcomes
Students will:
- Explain the role of cybersecurity’s professional code of ethics and career opportunities.
- Outline the context and importance of core principles of cybersecurity and a threat matrix
- Define the vocabulary associated with cybersecurity
- Evaluate various security systems, practices, and frameworks for overall effectiveness, usability, and feasibility
- Evaluate attacks, vulnerabilities, threats, control measures, and trust to determine cyber risk
- Create a secure network topology from a working scenario
Course Objectives
Students:
- Summarize how cybersecurity impacts the quality of people’s lives through an examination of digital participation worldwide and the rise of IoT.
- Construct models for establishing Trust, System Security, Adversarial Thinking, and Risk.
- Explain how network standards and protocols allow different types of devices to communicate.
- Understand data security controls including authentication, identification, authorization, and access controls.
- Describe the purpose of common cybersecurity laws at the federal and state level
- Analyze common security failures and identify specific design principles that have been violated
- Classify various malicious attack types, actors, and malware
- Examine the social and psychological factors that play into exploiting and/or implementing information security systems and policies
- Apply the vocabulary and abstract systems that are a part of the basics of cryptography and data encryption
- Identify hardware and software security issues related to an adversary gaining access to a device or network.