Cybersecurity Audit: A practical guide from scratch

Define information security and cyber security, noting information security covers all data formats while cyber security protects digital systems from cyber threats. Understand their differences and defenses like physical controls.

Identify threat, vulnerability, and risk concepts and learn how attacks like phishing and brute force exploit weaknesses; apply security controls and incident response to protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Confidentiality means protecting information so only authorized individuals can access it, and an unencrypted personal data breach led to identity theft, fines, and reputational damage, underscoring encryption and authentication.

Protect data integrity across the life cycle by ensuring accuracy and consistency, defending against unauthorized modification, data corruption, and injection attacks with controls like digital signatures, hashing, and backups.

Ensure continuous service availability by implementing redundancy, disaster recovery, and monitoring to keep data and systems accessible for authorized users during peak periods.

Learn how authentication verifies user identity and how authorization grants access to resources. Explore methods like passwords, two-factor authentication, biometrics, and digital certificates, with practical access control examples.

Learn how accountability and traceability drive responsible information security, with audit logs, continuous monitoring, and clear policies to record who did what and when, supporting investigations and compliance.

Explore how GDPR and PCI-DSS safeguard personal and payment card data, covering consent, access rights, breach notifications, data security, and the compliance benefits for organizations.

Explore CIS controls and other regulations that shape cybersecurity, including HIPAA, Fisma, Sox, and CSA Cloud Security Alliance's Cloud Controls Matrix, guiding cloud security and regulatory compliance.

Plan a thorough cyber security audit by defining objectives, scope, and methodology, allocating resources, reviewing prior documentation, and coordinating timelines with stakeholders to identify risks.

Define audit scope by identifying critical assets, reviewing processes and policies, evaluating security controls such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems, and outlining geographical coverage, compliance requirements, and scope exclusions.

Explore a practical four-week cybersecurity audit plan that evaluates technical controls, policies, and staff training, guiding planning, execution, and reporting to strengthen organizational security posture.

Learn how auditors combine observation, interviews, document reviews, and photographs to assess physical and cyber security, verify backups, and identify vulnerabilities through tests like penetration testing and log analysis.

Explore auditing tools to enhance cybersecurity assessments, covering vulnerability analysis, penetration testing, log management, configuration analysis, and audit management, boosting efficiency, automation, data handling, and reporting.

Identify and assess cybersecurity risks using asset, threat, and vulnerability identification; apply qualitative, quantitative, and semi-quantitative analyses with a risk matrix to prioritize mitigation actions.

Develop and implement an information security policy aligned with ISO 27001 to protect information assets through objectives, scope, risk management, controls, incident response, training, documentation, audits, and continuous improvement.

Audit of the information security policy validates documentation and accessibility and covers risk management, security controls, incident management, updates, training, awareness, monitoring, and continuous improvement.

Develop incident response procedures to classify incidents by priority, coordinate the response team, detect and contain threats, recover systems, communicate updates, document actions, and drive continuous improvement.

Explore how disaster recovery plans (DRP) and business continuity plans (BCP) protect operations, with auditing focus on critical asset analysis, scenario strategies, simulations, and regular plan updates.

Audit cybersecurity awareness and training programs to educate employees about phishing, passwords, malware, and incident response, ensuring updates, assessments, and role-based content for regulatory compliance.

Explore how security controls, including preventive, detective, corrective, and deterrent measures, protect information assets with physical, administrative, and technical controls to uphold confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Access controls restrict who can access information using physical protections such as cameras and biometrics, and logical controls like authentication, authorization, session control, and audit to prevent unauthorized access.

Learn to plan, review policies, and field-evaluate physical access controls to protect assets and facilities, testing biometrics, video surveillance, visitor procedures, and disaster recovery in data centers.

Learn how data protection safeguards confidentiality, integrity, and availability through encryption, including symmetric and asymmetric uses with public and private keys, plus data loss prevention in enterprise.

Conduct a structured data protection audit focusing on encryption and data loss prevention to assess policies, controls, key management, and compliance for data in transit and at rest.

This lecture presents application security practices for secure development and monitoring across apps. It covers two-factor authentication and authorization, encryption, patching, and static and dynamic analysis.

Learn how to plan, review, test, and report an application security audit, covering policies, architecture, code reviews, penetration testing, production controls, data protection, and API security.

Explore how a cyber security audit report aggregates executive summary, findings, scope, methodology, risk analysis, and recommendations to strengthen controls and ensure regulatory compliance.

Learn the audit report template for cybersecurity, covering executive summary, scope, methodology, findings, risk analysis, and action plans. Apply recommendations like MFA and GDPR considerations to improve security.