Foundations of Cybersecurity Practice

This unit introduces core cybersecurity concepts, common attack types, and the human, physical, and technical vulnerabilities that organizations face. Students will learn baseline protective controls (authentication, backups, access principles), how to assess risk, and how to design basic security awareness and testing plans to prepare for hands-on defensive work in subsequent units.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze common cybersecurity threats and attack vectors (including social engineering, malware, network, and physical breaches) and classify their likely impacts on confidentiality, integrity, and availability using multiple real-world examples.
• Evaluate an organization’s security posture by identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities across physical, network, and human domains and recommending mitigation actions based on likelihood and potential business impact.
• Apply foundational security controls—such as password and access management, backup and restore procedures, resets, and shared-responsibility considerations—to produce baseline configurations and documented recovery steps for a small organizational environment.
• Design and justify a basic security awareness and testing plan that defines goals, target audiences, ambassador roles, logistics, gamification elements, and social-engineering test scenarios to measurably improve human resilience and incident readiness.