Introduction to Cybersecurity

it was a Monday morning and I was digitally empty meaning meaning I had to leave my smartphone a laptop anything digital I had to leave behind as they checked my clearance level and let me in and it turns out that's the process that has to be followed when you're entering a secure area and I thought to myself as I was working on those systems whoa back in the 80s I was a cashier and now I'm in this you know secured area working on some really amazing secure systems how'd this happen and the answer is it

happens one step at a time and the market and the need for security and cyber security is huge and in this nugget I like to chat with you about some of the drivers for that and also we'll take a look in this course as some potential opportunities in cyber security careers let's take a closer look in the early days we had closed systems with old legacy systems like mainframes with very limited access it was centrally managed and there wasn't just easy access into the network to get to the mainframe we came in through a terminal

and as a result there wasn't that many possible attack vectors or methods if you will that could be used to access that data illegally unlawfully or compromise that data but in the 80s as we started networking and connecting devices together the network became more and more available first with Wired local area networks LANs and then with wireless access with things like Wi-Fi it simply made it easier for individuals to connect both honest and innocent users as well as malicious individuals also instead of having centralized servers we now have distributed devices we have computers with processing

power we have servers with processing power we can have servers in the cloud so having our content and services spread across multiple devices also allows more potential attack vectors or methods for compromise of those systems another big challenge are applications so we might have a user let's put Bob out here so we may have Bob that's using an application then that application is then accessing data on a back-end server somewhere but if that app is not secure that allows additional vulnerabilities to exist where some unauthorized individual could compromise or access our data and as far

as attackers go the attackers out there are in the millions of potential attackers and I'm sure that hundreds of thousands of those attackers are actually really good at what they do and that's why it's important for organizations and governments and individuals to be really good at cybersecurity now the question may come up Keith what is cybersecurity effectively it's us protecting our systems our networks our applications from any kind of digital attack or compromise and the reason is so important is because it's so expensive if there is compromise to our systems and to our networks and

to our data case in point we may have an organization that spent a decade in building their business and putting other systems in place they may have hundreds of employees but if they are attacked and compromised and all the data they had regarding clients and personally identifiable information and other company secrets if that's all stolen or exfiltrated out of the company that may be the end of the company from one simple security breach and let's pause for a moment and think to ourselves ok what does a company or organization really need regarding security and I

think it boils down to three basic things number one is that only the people who are authorized who are supposed to be able to access and see and modify the data only those people should be able to do that and to make that happen we're gonna have to use good authentication which is identifying who an individual is or entity is as well as authorization controlling what they're allowed to do and we're gonna do that with technical controls we're not just gonna do the honor system you know only login if you're supposed to we're gonna force

that with controls called technical controls that make sure that when Bob's logging in it's really Bob and some methods that we might use for authentication include two-factor authentication an example of that is something that Bob knows like a pin or a password along with another factor or another element such as something Bob has like a car the smart card that might have a computer chip in it or a digital certificate in it and both of those elements both of those factors if you will are required for Bob to log in and that would be a

good example of doing authentication to prove that Bob is really Bob then once Bob logs in and proves who he is based on his permissions and rights he can access various resources based on his authorization like permissions of what Bob's allowed to do another security goal would be to make sure that the unauthorized people shouldn't be able to see our sensitive our private information and the challenges our information can be lots of places it can be sitting at rest on a disk or a flash drive or it could be moving through the network coursing through

the veins of our network and that would be referred to as data in transit and if somebody steals a hard drive or if they start listening in on the network traffic and stealing the data how do we protect it in one big way of keeping that data that information confidential so the unauthorized individual can't read it or make sense of it is to use encryption which is effectively scrambling the data so that the unauthorized people can't make sense of it and popular methods of scrambling data in motion include IPSec which is just an acronym that

means we're securing IP and there's a whole bunch of rules that are set up behind that to make that possible another one to protect data in motion is referred to as TLS or SSL which is transport layer security or Secure Sockets Layer and that's a very popular option that we use when we connect from a computer out to a website that not only provides the encryption and confidentiality it also helps us to verify that we are talking to the correct site and not some hacker site and then the third element that a company wants as

far as protecting its resources and assets and doing good cyber security is to consider the potential compromises or attacks that might come up and then regarding those compromises think about before during and after and part of cyber security is to consider okay before the attack happens what could happen what are the vulnerabilities or weaknesses that each of our aspects of our system may have and then put in countermeasures or precautionary measures that can help prevent that type of attack from being successful and like my mom said a stitch in time saves nine and preventing an

attack is way more desirable and takes a lot less time and effort than cleaning up after an attack however if attacks do happen or compromises do happen part of cyber security would be to respond to those attacks and that way the damage can be identified contained with the intent to restore full functionality and full security and also minimize the impact the negative impact of that security breach and then after an attack there may be some investigations that are needed so part of cyber security would be a well thought-out plan of how we're going to do

forensics and investigations regarding what happened to clearly identify what did occur and the lessons learned from that would also be used to help prevent that type of an attack from happening in the future and a huge aspect regarding cybersecurity is education wow that's green Green is a little hard to read let me read you that education because a professional in the cyber security field is just one person or one team and there needs to be education across the board users are often the weakest link case in point there may be a user here like Bob

and if Bob has excessive permissions on his computer and gets an email it clicks on a link and install some software there could be malicious software that's being installed on his computer as a result of his actions and getting a bogus email would be an example of a phishing attack and if Bob falls for it the malware on his system could be ransomware which you can require some money or ransom to be paid for his system to be unlocked or it could just be a masquerade that's masquerading some other attack that's currently in play so

maybe the attacker is using several machines on the inside as misdirection while they're going after some even more critical data somewhere else so continual training before during and after for everyone involved is another huge part in keeping our networks and systems secure in this video we've talked about the concept that the world of cyber security is really important it is definitely learn about and it is in demand and in the next nugget we'll take a look at some job roles in the world of cyber security and some of those responsibilities so I look forward to

seeing you in the very next video meanwhile I hope this has been informative for you and I'd like to thank you for viewing