Introduction to Cyber

What cybersecurity protects, how the field grew, and the basic terms used to describe what can go wrong.

Learning Objectives

• Define cybersecurity and the people, processes and technology it covers.
• Explain confidentiality, integrity and availability, and how attacks harm each one.
• Describe authentication and non-repudiation, the two goals that extend the CIA triad.
• Outline the key events in the history of cybersecurity, from Creeper to SolarWinds.
• Explain how threats, vulnerabilities, exploits and risk relate to each other.
• Describe attack surfaces and attack vectors.
• Score a risk by likelihood and impact.

Who carries out cyberattacks, how an attack unfolds in stages, and how threat actors trick people.

Learning Objectives

• Describe the main types of threat actor and their motives and capabilities.
• Explain how AI is raising the threat from less-skilled threat actors.
• Explain what an advanced persistent threat is.
• Name the seven stages of the Cyber Kill Chain and apply them to an attack.
• Explain how MITRE ATT&CK describes tactics and techniques.
• Describe the main types of social engineering and phishing.
• Spot the warning signs of a phishing email, and report a suspicious message.

What malware is, how it spreads, what it does once inside, and how security tools find it.

Learning Objectives

• Define malware and describe its four parts: delivery, propagation, persistence and payload.
• Name the common ways malware gets onto a computer.
• Tell viruses, worms and Trojans apart.
• Describe ransomware, spyware, backdoors, rootkits, botnets and cryptominers.
• Explain signature, heuristic, behaviour and sandbox detection.
• Work out a file's SHA-256 hash and check that antivirus protection is up to date.

How weaknesses in systems are named, scored and exploited, and how organisations find and fix them.

Learning Objectives

• Describe the main types of vulnerability.
• Read a CVE ID and explain what a CVSS score and severity rating mean.
• Explain how a vulnerability, an exploit and a payload work together.
• Describe remote, local, privilege escalation and client-side exploits, and zero-days.
• Explain the legal and ethical limits on using exploits.
• Describe the vulnerability management cycle and how to prioritise fixes.
• Check which updates a computer has installed.

How organisations layer their defences, control who gets in, and respond when an attack succeeds.

Learning Objectives

• Explain defence in depth and name its layers.
• Classify security controls by what they are and what they do.
• Explain identification, authentication, authorisation and accounting.
• Describe authentication factors, multi-factor authentication and the principle of least privilege.
• Check whether an account has administrator rights.
• Describe the role of a security operations centre and a SIEM.
• Name the four phases of the incident response lifecycle and apply them to an incident.

A consolidation quiz that draws together every topic in the module, from the goals of cybersecurity to responding to an incident.

Learning Objectives

• Link threats, vulnerabilities and exploits to the harm they cause to confidentiality, integrity and availability.
• Follow an attack from the threat actor's first step through malware and exploits to its impact.
• Match each stage of an attack to the defences and controls that can stop it.
• Explain how detection, patching and incident response work together to limit damage.