COM3079 - Cybersecurity Fundamentals and Concepts

Course Description

This course introduces fundamental cyber security concepts. This course covers the fundamentals of risk management, cryptography, incident response and recovery, access control, authentication, types of attackers and attacks, and countermeasures. Students sometimes choose to take the CompTIA Security+ certification test following completion of this class because of the large overlap between this course and the Security+ exam objectives.

Learner Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, the student should be able to: 1. List the first principles of security and describe why each principle is important to security and its relationship to the development of security mechanisms and security policies. 2. Describe why good human machine interfaces are important to system use, the interaction between security and system usability and the importance for minimizing the effects of security mechanisms. 3. Analyze common security failures and identify specific design principles that have been violated, and the needed design principle, when given a specific scenario. 4. List the fundamental concepts of the Information Assurance/Cyber Defense discipline and describe how they can be used to provide system security. 5. Identify the elements of a cryptographic system and describe the differences between symmetric and asymmetric algorithms, which cryptographic protocols, tools and techniques are appropriate for a given situation, and implementation issues.