Foundations of Cybersecurity and Risk

This unit introduces the cybersecurity threat landscape, common attack types, and core defensive concepts including physical, network, and human-centered controls (authentication, backups, access management, and shared responsibility). It reinforces introductory knowledge and prepares students for deeper technical and operational units on incident response, secure architecture, and hands-on defensive measures.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze common cyber threats, attack types, and attacker motivations to determine likely impacts on organizational assets
• Apply basic risk assessment techniques to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities across physical, network, and human elements
• Demonstrate implementation of core defensive controls including strong authentication practices, backup and restore procedures, and appropriate access-level decisions within shared responsibility models
• Evaluate components of an organizational security awareness program and design a basic awareness plan with goals, metrics, roles, budget, and engagement strategies