Course: Security basics

The use of software grows exponentially everywhere around us and with that the risk of security issues is getting higher. This is especially valid, when the initial planning of a software system (or just an application) did not include security as a topic.

Security is crucial part of every system and business. Neglecting it might cause financial and reputational damage like:

• data loss
• malicious software infection (i.e. ransomware, malware, keyloggers, spyware and so on)
• credentials leaking
• denial of service
• further spread to other systems

With security, the default policy must always be to make it as hard as possible for a vulnerability to spread further. Unfortunately that is not always the case.

This is a very basic and introductory course on the topic of security. Its aim is to briefly introduce the most common and important sub-topics and concepts related to security. As such, this is mainly a theoretical course with very few practical experiments included. However, the knowledge gained has practical use in day-to-day tasks and can be useful in more advanced technical operations and security planning.

This course is intended for novice users or non-technical users, who have very little experience or information about security. This course by itself is not sufficient for in-depth security understanding and is meant as a direction pointer for additional topics and knowledge to be acquired.

1. Security basics
2. Users and permissions
3. Importance of passwords and password strength. Summary of password cracking/attacks.
4. Two factor authentication / Multi-factor authentication (2FA / TFA / MFA)
5. Unencrypted traffic
6. Firewalls
7. Hashing and encryption
8. Summary and basics of Virtual Private Networking (VPN) and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
9. Default security policies