Module 1 Overview
January 11-17 · Reading: 7 pages · Estimated total: 5 hours
The first week does two things. It gets your tools working, and it gives you the vocabulary the rest of the semester runs on.
That vocabulary matters more than it sounds like it should. In ordinary speech, threat, vulnerability, attack, and risk are near-synonyms. In this course they are four different things, and confusing them produces sentences that cannot be acted on. "We have a threat in our login system" tells an engineer nothing. "Our login system has a vulnerability that an opportunistic attacker could exploit at low cost, and the impact would be total account takeover" tells them what to do on Monday.
You are not expected to know any of this already.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this week, the successful student will be able to:
- 1.1: Define confidentiality, integrity, and availability, and identify which goal a described failure violates.
- 1.2: Use the terms threat, vulnerability, attack, and risk correctly in writing about a security incident.
Assignments and Tasks
Due by Tuesday at 11:59 p.m. Mountain Time
- Read 1.01 Readings and Lecture Notes and work through the worked example (1 hr 15 min)
Due by Thursday at 11:59 p.m. Mountain Time
- 0.03 D1: Introductions and the Security Mindset: initial post
Due by Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Mountain Time
- 0.04 D1: Introductions and the Security Mindset - Replies: one reply (45 min with the initial post, 15 points)
- 0.05 Lab 0: Course Setup and CyBOK Navigation (45 min, 20 points)
Do Lab 0 early. It installs the Python package that weeks 7, 8, and 10 depend on. If something does not work on your machine, week 1 is when to find out.
Time Estimate
| Activity | Time |
|---|---|
| Reading (7 pages) | 45 min |
| The notes page and the worked example | 30 min |
| Lab 0 | 45 min |
| D1 post and reply | 45 min |
| Review and slack | 2 hrs |
| Total | ~5 hrs |
Week 1 is deliberately light. Later weeks run closer to seven hours.