Detecting and Mitigating Cyber Threats and Attacks

Computer attacks and data breaches are inevitable. It seems like every day a data breach occurs and the victims of the data breach suffer. Their information is stolen or posted online. The company’s or businesses who had the breach go on, learn a little from the attack, and just give credit monitoring out as if nothing happened. What if you could help prevent a data breach in your organization? This is the third course in the Practical Computer Security specialization. This course looks at detection and mitigation of threats and attack vectors and discusses how to use tools and principles to protect information. By the end of the course you should be able to make suggestions on what type of detection and mitigation strategy is right for your systems or business given the known threats and attack vectors. You should be able to discuss what features you want in a firewall, or how cash registers or sensitive data systems should be secured. The project at the end of the course will allow you to apply what you have learned to argue what type of detection and mitigation strategies should have been employed by companies and businesses that have suffered a data breach.

• Introduction and Firewalls
• Welcome! This week we'll explore firewalls as they are usually the first line of defense against a threat or attack.
• Intrusion Detection and Prevention
• This module will cover intrusion detection and prevention, which is one of the most essential concepts in looking at how threats and attacks are detected and mitigated.
• Detection and Prevention tools
• This module covers intrusion detection and prevention tools used for both networks and systems. There will be demos of the tools so that you can understand how they might protect your network or systems better.
• Attacks are Inevitable - Case Study
• This module will focus on attacks and how detection and response makes the world of difference when responding to an attack.
• Understanding detection and mitigation
• This module is the course project. You will review data breaches and understand how they were detected and mitigated.