SCFND 210-250: A Guide to Cyber Security Fundamentals

Examine legacy vulnerabilities in the tcp/ip protocol suite, including ip spoofing, sequence number prediction, port scanning, and denial of service, and their impact on early network security.

Explore IP vulnerabilities, including lack of source verification, spoofing, and man-in-the-middle risk. Analyze session hijacking, eavesdropping, and denial-of-service attacks, including distributed denial-of-service and smurf techniques.

Explore the vulnerabilities of ICMP, its diagnostic role, and how attackers use ICMP for reconnaissance, OS fingerprinting, man-in-the-middle attacks, tunneling, and DoS, including Smurf and firewalking techniques.

Reveal how a three-way handshake and half-open connections enable synchronization flooding and DoS attacks on DCB-based services, including spoofed IPs and reset risks.

Explores TCP vulnerabilities including spoofing, synchronized flooding, and session hijacking, detailing how attackers exploit handshake sequence numbers, disrupt connections, and defenses like blocking spoofed packets can mitigate.

Explore the vulnerabilities of UDP, a connectionless transport protocol with no reliability, showing how eavesdropping, spoofing, and flood attacks exploit checksum, port handling, and incomplete verification to compromise systems.

Analyze the attack surface across four areas—network, software, physical, and social engineering—and learn how weaknesses in protocols, services, access, and human factors heighten risk.

Explore reconnaissance attacks that gather information about target networks - IP addresses, subdomains, and reachability - using sniffing, network sweeps, port scanning, and nslookup.

Conduct active and passive reconnaissance to gather information about target networks as a step toward exploitation, using tools like dig, whois, DNS registries, and traceroute to map IPs and services.

Explore access attacks that exploit improper authorization to breach user accounts, networks, and data, and learn how spoofing, masquerading, session hijacking, and malware enable unauthorized access.

Learn how man-in-the-middle attacks intercept and manipulate communications across layers, using arp poisoning, dns spoofing, ssl hijacking, and browser malware to steal data.

Explore denial of service and distributed denial of service attacks, including syn floods, icmp and udp floods, and botnet-driven campaigns, and their impact on networks and defenses.

Explore reflection and amplification attacks, where attackers spoof target IPs to trigger reflectors into flooding victims, with small requests causing large replies, exemplified by smurf attacks.

Explore spoofing techniques that inject traffic with forged sources, including IP address spoofing and MAC address spoofing, and how spoofing enables attacks such as email spoofing and land attacks.

Explore how dhcp attacks abuse dynamic ip allocation to expose rogue dhcp servers and spoof gateways, and learn protections like dhcp snooping and ip source guard.

Explore information security concepts and infosec as a strategy comprising people, processes, policies, and tools to detect, prevent, document, and mitigate threats and protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Explore the CIA triad (confidentiality, integrity, availability) and how encryption, cryptographic hashes, and fault tolerance protect large, interconnected networks.

Explore personally identifiable information and biometric information (BI) defined by U.S. privacy law, with examples like names, SSN, birth details, biometric data, and discuss breaches and incident response for PHI.

Explore how risk arises from threats exploiting vulnerabilities, with impact and likelihood guiding qualitative and quantitative risk assessment, and learn risk management options from acceptance to transfer.

Assess vulnerabilities to test networks and information systems for weaknesses, apply fixes or mitigations, and prioritize risks using a scoring framework that considers impact and exploitability.

Explore how CVSS 3.0 provides a free, open standard for assessing vulnerability severity, enabling prioritization of responses based on base, temporal, and environmental scores.

Understand how access control models regulate resource and information access. Explore mandatory, discretionary, and non-discretionary models, plus least privilege, time-based access, and separation of duties.

Understand how regulatory compliance shapes organizational security architectures and liability for noncompliance, and explore trends like data breach notifications, third-party risk, and automated compliance processes.

Identify assets and implement policies and procedures within an information security management system. Apply pdca cycle, risk assessment, and controls to protect assets across cloud, mobile, and virtual data centers.

Explore how security operations centers monitor and defend enterprise networks, data centers, and endpoints, integrate people and technology, and shift from detect-and-prevent to threat-focused defenses.

Explore cryptography's role in guaranteeing confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation while examining encryption challenges, SSL and DNS blind spots, and regulatory considerations for security analysts.

Explore how cryptography underpins cybersecurity fundamentals by securely handling messages through confidentiality, data integrity, origin authentication, and non-repudiation, while cryptology and cryptanalysis advance the discipline.

Trace the history of cryptography from ancient diplomatic messengers to military communications. Explore the Caesar cipher, Jefferson's encryption system, Enigma, and Colossus from World War II.

Explore how substitution ciphers and polyalphabetic methods encode messages, reveal frequency analysis weaknesses, and examine transposition ciphers like rail fence, plus the one-time pad and its key distribution challenges.

Explore hashing as a data integrity tool: one-way functions produce fixed-length digests, where any data change triggers the avalanche effect and may cause hash collisions.

Explore how keyed hashing with a secret key produces a message authentication code to verify data integrity and authenticate message origin, while noting it does not provide privacy.

Compare hashing algorithms like md5, sha-1, and sha-2, their one-way digests, and the presence of collision vulnerabilities, digest sizes, and security trade-offs.

Explore how cryptanalysis analyzes encrypted data by applying brute force, ciphertext-only, known plaintext, chosen plaintext, chosen ciphertext, birthday, and meet-in-the-middle attacks, and how large key spaces resist these techniques.

Symmetric encryption uses the same key for encryption and decryption, so parties must share the key to communicate securely; key management and key length up to 256 bits influence security.

Compare symmetric key encryption algorithms by key length, complexity, and performance, noting des uses a 56-bit key, 3des uses a 168-bit key, aes uses 128-bit blocks and is hardware accelerated.

Explore asymmetric key algorithms, using a public and private key pair for encryption and decryption, with RSA and other curves, and discuss key sizes and security principles.

Describe Diffie-Hellman key exchange, where Alice and Bob derive a shared secret from p and g using private and public keys, with ephemeral keys per exchange.

Learn how ssh uses asymmetric encryption for key exchange and symmetric encryption for bulk data, enabling private sessions and version 1 legacy vs version 2 enhancements with public keys.

Digital signatures hash the document and encrypt the hash with the signer's private key; with the public key, recipients verify authenticity and integrity, ensuring non repudiation, typically rsa or dsa.

Explore how public key infrastructure secures key distribution, authenticates identities, and enables digital certificates issued by certificate authorities, with revocation, CSR workflows, and X.509 standards.

Explore SSL and TLS, certificate-based authentication, and public-key cryptography to secure browser-to-server sessions. Understand certificate validation, certificate chain, root and intermediate certificates, and common browser warnings.

Explore cipher suites and TLS handshakes, detailing RSA and ECDS authentication and key exchange, the derivation of pre-master and master keys, and MAC/PRF protection.

Securely generate, verify, exchange, store, and destroy keys to defend crypto systems against attacks targeting key management. Learn automated key generation with strong randomization, weak-key checks, and safe destruction.

Analyze how network applications use a client-server architecture and common protocols. Examine DNS, HTTP, TLS/SSL, and mail protocols such as SMTP, and how defenders counter SQL injection threats.

Map hostnames to ip addresses and other mappings via dns operations. Explore dns records such as a, ns, mx, cname, and soa, plus zone transfers and recursive and authoritative servers.

Learn how the recursive DNS process works, including authoritative vs non-authoritative data, caching, and the resolver's journey from root to domain servers.

Dynamic DNS automates discovery and registration of a device's changing public IPs with a DNS provider, linking host names to IPs in the domain name system.

Analyze http operations to identify anomalies in traffic captures, covering request methods, headers, response status codes, cookies, and secure connections for session protection.

Understand how HTTPS operations establish encrypted connections with TLS, digital certificates, and certificate authorities to protect data in transit and prevent eavesdropping and impersonation.

Explore how web scripting creates dynamic content and how attackers use malicious JavaScript in drive-by downloads. Learn server-side and client-side scripting to analyze web-based attacks with markup languages.

Explore how relational database systems power web applications and how insufficient input validation enables sql injection, with sql commands like select and from and user data in the users table.

Understand how email underpins corporate communication, the threats from spam and malware, and the mail delivery flow from MTA to MDA to users, including mail command sequences.