Protecting Data and Access

This unit teaches practical controls and procedures to locate, protect, and recover sensitive data across devices, cloud services, and user accounts. Students will learn account security, encryption, backup and recovery, continuity planning, social engineering defenses, and regulatory/insurance considerations to prepare for incident response and advanced defensive topics in later units.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze an environment to locate sensitive data, inventory backup sources, and identify vulnerabilities across devices, cloud services, and third-party relationships
• Apply access and authentication controls to secure user accounts and remote work connections, including strong password techniques, multi-factor authentication, VPN use, and protections against SIM swapping and account takeover
• Demonstrate backup, continuity, and recovery procedures by performing backups, restoring from full backups, executing hard-reset rebuilds, and outlining a basic disaster recovery and continuity plan
• Evaluate current security controls, physical security measures, and social engineering risks, and recommend remediation steps that consider legal/regulatory requirements and options such as cybersecurity insurance