Basics of Network Security

Understand the threats posed to organisations’ networks and how to secure them

On this course you will examine the theory and practice of network fundamentals from the defender’s and attacker’s perspectives. You will have the opportunity to use tools for networking that allow you to query services, test routing and more.

At the end of the course, you will have the opportunity to challenge yourself to a network security boot camp – can you work with a virtual networked device to make it secure?

The Institute of Coding supported the development of this course in response to consultation with industry representatives from the healthcare, manufacturing and automotive sectors.

This course is designed for people familiar with basic computing who want to learn about the techniques and technologies of network security.

Please note that the individuals detailed in the ‘Who will you learn with?’ section below, are current staff members and may be subject to change.

In order to complete the labs you will need a PC capable of running Virtual Machines (VMs). We recommend at least a dual core CPU and 8GB of memory. You would also need about 100GB of hard disk space to store the VMs.

In order to run the virtual machines you will need to download and install VMware Workstation Player (if you are running on Windows or Linux). It is free for non-commercial/educational use and you can get it from the VMware website. If you are running a Mac you will need VMware Fusion.

You will also use Linux. If you are not already familiar with the Linux environment and its command line, there are plenty of online resources and tutorials to get you started. We would recommend that you look into some of these before starting the modules. You need to be familiar with the core linux commands, input/output redirecting and piping, file manipulation, basic network configuration and user account management.