Advanced Operational Cybersecurity Practices

This capstone unit focuses on operationalizing cybersecurity through hands-on defensive and assessment practices, covering cloud controls, backups and recovery, penetration testing, insider and social engineering mitigation, and security awareness program management. Students will synthesize prior learning to prepare, test, measure, and improve organizational security posture across people, processes, and technology.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze complex threat scenarios—including insider risk, social engineering, poisoned web services, malvertising, and network infrastructure poisoning—and prioritize appropriate mitigations and incident response actions
• Apply the vulnerability and penetration testing process to simulate attacks (web, network, and cloud) and produce prioritized remediation reports with recommended controls
• Demonstrate secure data lifecycle practices by implementing backup, archive, exclusion, retention, and recovery strategies for on-premises and cloud environments, including responses to third-party data compromise
• Evaluate and redesign a security awareness and metrics program—incorporating branding, promotion, Day 0 metrics, and CISO-aligned governance—to measurably improve organizational resilience and compliance