Cybersecurity Foundations and Risk Awareness

This unit introduces foundational cybersecurity concepts, threat types, and common vulnerabilities across physical, human, and technical domains. Students will learn basic protective controls (authentication, backups, access management), risk assessment practices, and the components of an organizational security awareness and incident-prevention program to prepare for deeper technical and defensive work in subsequent units.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze how different stakeholders and contexts define cybersecurity and categorize common threat types (e.g., malware, network attacks, social engineering, physical breaches) and their impacts on assets.
• Evaluate organizational assets and vulnerabilities using basic threat-modeling and risk-assessment techniques that consider physical security, network weaknesses, and human factors.
• Apply core protective controls and best practices—including password-based authentication, backup and restore procedures, access-level determination, and the cloud shared responsibility model—to mitigate identified risks.
• Develop and demonstrate elements of a security awareness and incident-prevention plan by establishing goals, selecting program components (training, testing, gamification, ambassadors), and proposing metrics, budget, and logistics for ongoing evaluation.