Foundations of Cybersecurity

Course provides an overview of theory, tools and practice of cyber security and information assurance through prevention, detection and modeling of cyber attacks and recovery from such attacks. Techniques for security modeling, attack modeling, risk analysis and cost-benefit analysis are described to manage the security of cyber systems. Fundamental principles of cyber security and their applications for protecting software and information assets of individual computers and large networked systems are explored. Anatomy of some sample attacks designed to compromise confidentiality, integrity and availability of cyber systems are discussed.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

• Understanding of security concerns through the system development life cycle
• Techniques for modeling threats and analysis of risks
• Fundamental understanding of security principles and operational security
• Network security: cryptographic algorithms, security mechanisms, and firewalls
• Understanding of attack vectors and exploitation of vulnerabilities

Course Material

This course took an in depth approach on showing us how cyber attacks are conducted. Tools such as Netcraft and Maltego can give us a lot of information on websites and the organizatons that run them. We had a big focus on the programming stack and how different kinds of exploits such as Buffer Overflow and Format String can take advantage of code to gain access to a system. Risk assessment was also a key topic of the course in which we learned techniques for modeling threats and how risk is calculated.