HarvardX: CS50's Introduction to Cybersecurity

In our interconnected world, everybody – not just IT specialists – has to develop cybersecurity knowledge, information security awareness, and cyber defense skills. This course offers a holistic and accessible introduction to the fundamentals of cybersecurity, computer security, network security, digital privacy, and cyber risk management to technical as well as non-technical students, and gives you the understanding you need to secure data, devices, networks and digital systems against modern day threats. Learning about cybersecurity as a state of complete safety won’t lead you anywhere.

You’ll get the tools to approach security by risk (cyber threats, vulnerabilities, cyber risk assessment, rewards, cost vs usability, security management, and threat analysis etc).

The students will gain a high-level overview on all major fields within cyber security, information technology security, and cyber defense: data protection, passwords, malware, phishing, social engineering, computer network security, computer network privacy, authentication and authorization, computer network encryption, cyber risk estimation, digital security, online privacy, identity protection, endpoint security, and cyber threat intelligence, etc. You’ll understand the difficult choices when trying to obtain cybersecurity from different dimensions of usability, efficiency, price, convenience, confidentiality and more, both in our daily lives, at home and at the enterprise.

The students are expected to perform several practical labs/exercises based on the threat landscape at the time and to use high-level and low-level concepts along with several interesting, and sadly real, examples of cyber attacks, cyber incidents, data breaches, security vulnerabilities, phishing attacks, ransomware threats, and cybersecurity best practices. This will be very useful for the student in all his life, professionally as well as personally.