Cyber Security For Beginners (CYBERSEC101)

Explore cybersecurity core concepts in this first section, focusing on the CIA triad: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Build foundational knowledge essential for understanding cybersecurity.

Practice defense in depth by implementing diverse, multi-vendor controls across different areas to prevent a single vulnerability from granting attackers access to critical data.

Explore the cia triad (confidentiality, integrity, and availability) and learn encryption, access controls, hashing, digital signatures, and redundancy to protect data and ensure system uptime.

Learn to assess information security risk, balancing threats and vulnerabilities to protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability; reduce likelihood and impact with controls, least privilege, and continuity planning.

Explore how policies and standard operating procedures shape behavior and compliance, covering acceptable use policies, mandatory vacations, separation of duties, onboarding and offboarding, NDAs, and the clean desk policy.

Identify data types, apply classifications from public to private including unclassified and confidential, and manage data lifecycle with proper disposal and retention policies, while following HIPAA, GLBA, SOX, and GDPR.

Explore the range of security controls, from physical to detective and preventative measures. Learn ideas for identifying potential controls and how to implement them.

Explore technical, administrative, and physical controls, including encryption, firewalls, antivirus, risk assessments, and penetration tests. Learn how contingency planning, backups, and physical safeguards like lighting and guards reduce vulnerabilities.

Assess physical security controls like perimeter defenses, building protections, signage, air gapping, and access methods such as cipher locks, proximity cards, biometrics, and tailgating prevention.

Explore environmental controls that protect system availability with cooling, hot and cold aisles, fire suppression, and shielding methods like shielded twisted pair, PDA cabling, conduits, and Faraday cages.

Explore the spectrum of malware types, from viruses and worms to logic bombs, backdoors, trojans, ransomware, spyware, and botnets, and learn how they covertly compromise systems.

Learn how antivirus and anti-malware software protect against attacks by staying updated and using signature-based, heuristic-based, and file integrity checks, plus data execution prevention and spam filters.

Expose how attackers use impersonation, tailgating, dumpster diving, spam, phishing, spear fishing, waterhole attacks, and spoofing caller IDs to trick users, with antivirus and training defending them.

Eliminate single points of failure by implementing redundancy through RAID configurations, failover clusters, load balancers, power redundancy, and backups (full, differential, incremental) with encryption and offsite storage.

Identify critical systems with a business impact analysis to determine recovery time objective, recovery point objective, mean time between failures, and meantime to recover for continuous operations.

Explore continuity of operations by selecting recovery sites: hot sites run 24/7 and stay up to date, warm sites become operational after data provisioning, and cold sites offer cheaper options.

Define disaster recovery plans as a key component of business continuity, outlining steps to restore critical systems in order of criticality and validating the sequence with tabletop exercises.