CYSE 301

Registered for Fall 2025

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Introduction to Cybersecurity

This course provides an overview of the field of cybersecurity. It covers core cybersecurity topics including computer system architectures, critical infrastructures, cyber threats and vulnerabilities, cryptography, information assurance, network security, and risk assessment and management. Students are expected to become familiar with fundamental security concepts, technologies, and practices. This course provides a foundation for further study in cybersecurity.

The course objectives are:

  • Identify and prioritize information assets;
  • Identify and prioritize threats to information assets;
  • Define an information security strategy and architecture;
  • Plan for and respond to intruders in an information system;
  • Describe legal and public relations implications of security and privacy issues; and
  • Present a disaster recovery plan for recovery of information assets after an incident.

Course Material

Please provide a brief overview of your work within this course, explaining how you engaged with the above learning outcomes. You will want to include examples of your assignments that demonstrate your practice with these concepts, explaining what you did and how it helped you learn. You may include embedded versions of your material, pictures, audio explaining your work, a video, so on (Tutorials: Adding and Embedding Media, Plugin: Simple YouTube Embed, More).

The course contains ten cybersecurity laboratory assignments and a research paper. Please include the research paper and a few of the laboratory reports you generated for the class. The laboratory reports should contain the required artifacts illustrating the successful completion of cybersecurity-related activities. They should be formatted and written in a professional manner as if you were submitting them to executives in an organization.

The cybersecurity laboratories include the following:

  • Performing reconnaissance and probing using common tools;
  • Performing a vulnerability assessment;
  • Enabling Windows Active Directory and user access controls;
  • Using group policy objects and Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer for change control;
  • Performing packet capture and traffic analysis;
  • Implementing a business continuity plan;
  • Using encryption to enhance confidentiality and integrity;
  • Performing a website and database attack by exploiting identified vulnerabilities;
  • Eliminating threats with a layered security approach; and
  • Implementing an information systems security policy.

Cybersecurity Techniques and Operations

This course introduces tools and techniques used to secure and analyze large computer networks and systems. Students will systematically learn C programming in the first part of the course, which forms a foundation for many cybersecurity operations, such as malware analysis, understanding network protocol stack, etc. In the second part, students will explore and map networks using a variety of diagnostic software tools, learn advanced packet analysis, configure firewalls, write intrusion detection rules, perform forensic investigation, and practice techniques for penetration testing. The objectives are:

  • Understand the concepts and major constructs of the C programming language,
  • Master the programming skills of the C programming language,
  • Be able to analyze the C source code to infer the functionality of a given code segment, C function, C program etc,
  • Grasp the needed techniques and skills to write a C program in cybersecurity operations such as a network protocol stack,
  • Monitor and analyze network traffic. Identify and trace the traffic when intrusion is detected in the network,
  • Identify and evaluate the vulnerabilities in the network and implement effective countermeasures to protect the network,
  • Master the technologies to exploit the vulnerabilities in a remote system,
  • Analyze the vulnerabilities in wireless communication network,
  • Manage data and personal information in a secure manner.

Course Material

There are both programming assignments for C programming and hands-on labs for cybersecurity and operations. Please include some of the materials (listed below) that you produced within the course, explaining what you did and how these projects helped you engage with the outcomes listed above.

The programming assignments are as follows:

  1. Write a function htoi(s), which concerts a string of hexadecimal digits into its equivalent integer value.
  2. Write a function any(s1, s2) that returns the first location in the string s1 where any character from the string s2 occurs, or -1 if s1 contains no characters from s2.
  3. Using pointer, write a function strcat(s, t) that copies string t to the end of string s
  4. Write a program expr, which evaluates a reverse Polish expression from the command line. For example expr 2 3 4 + * evaluates 2* (3 + 4).
  5. Write a program to compare two files, printing the first line where they differ.

The hands-on labs are as follows:

  1. Traffic tracing through Wireshark and TCPdump
  2. Firewall configuration with pfSense
  3. Penetration test on Windows
  4. Password cracking
  5. Information hidin

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