Handbook

This course provides students with an introduction to the rapidly growing field of cyber security. It is suitable for anyone who wishes to understand more about this fascinating and rapidly emerging global challenge. The course provides an overview of the main aspects of contemporary cyber security, including cyber crime, cyber criminals, cyber war, scams, exploitation, human errors and mistakes, vulnerabilities, responding to emergencies, sensible risk assessment and risk management.

We consider the question: We can build a bridge that doesn't fall down; why can't we yet build a system that can't be hacked? We consider what we can learn from established disciplines, including engineering, safety science, investment, and military intelligence, that can help us establish the new discipline of cyber security.

This course introduces an engineering-style approach to how we can design, manage, and improve secure systems. However students do not have to be engineers to take this course, indeed the interactive parts of the course work best when we have a multi-disciplinary, diverse range of students. As well as learning core cyber security terminology and concepts (such as introductory cryptography, the main classes of computer vulnerabilities that hackers exploit, and how to analyse risk), students also work in diverse teams to analyse and respond to a range of case studies drawn from historical security and security related scenarios (such as incident response to emergencies, system design, root cause failure analysis).