Systems and Cybersecurity Fundamentals Part 1

Northeastern University via Coursera

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Provider

Coursera
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Paid Certificate Available
Duration & workload

10 hours 43 minutes
Sessions

On-Demand
Level

Beginner
Subtitles

English

Found in

Overview

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This course is best suited for individuals who wish to develop expertise in cybersecurity fundamentals, including aspiring security professionals, IT administrators seeking to enhance their security knowledge, developers interested in secure systems design, and business professionals who need to understand cybersecurity risks and controls. Whether you're transitioning into cybersecurity or strengthening your existing technical foundation, this course provides essential knowledge for protecting digital assets and information systems.

Syllabus

Course Welcome and Introduction to Security and Risk Management

This module introduces fundamental cybersecurity concepts essential for understanding modern security challenges and organizational risk management. You will explore the CIA Triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability) as the foundational framework for cybersecurity strategy while examining common cyber threats that organizations face today, including phishing, ransomware, and supply chain attacks. The module covers the evolving cybersecurity landscape driven by cloud computing, remote work, and AI technologies, analyzing real-world data breaches and their impacts on businesses and society. Additionally, we’ll touch on Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) frameworks that align security practices with business objectives and regulatory requirements, establishing the strategic foundation for effective cybersecurity management.

Security Policies and Legal Considerations

In this module, you'll discover why security policies are the invisible backbone of cybersecurity—often overlooked until a breach exposes their weaknesses. You'll learn to evaluate real-world policies for clarity, enforceability, and coverage of modern risks like cloud services, AI use, and remote work. Through examining actual breach cases, you'll understand how policy gaps directly enable attackers and lead to regulatory fines, lawsuits, and business disruption. By the end of this module, you'll be able to draft security policies that align with legal requirements like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS, and write enforceable language that can actually prevent incidents rather than just satisfy auditors. You'll also understand how governance structures ensure policies translate from boardroom principles into daily operational practices that protect your organization.

Data Classification and Protection

In this module, you'll discover why knowing what data you have is just as critical as protecting it—and how organizations regularly fail at both. You'll learn to classify data based on sensitivity and business value, from public marketing materials to highly regulated patient records, and understand how misclassification can lead to million-dollar breaches and compliance failures. Through examining real cases like the Equifax breach, you'll see how poor asset inventory and data lifecycle management create vulnerabilities that attackers exploit. By the end of this module, you'll be able to design data classification schemes that align with regulatory requirements and implement protection controls that match the actual risk and value of your organization's information assets. You'll also understand how modern tools like DLP, encryption, and automated discovery can help organizations maintain visibility and control over their data throughout its entire lifecycle.

Secure Storage and Retention

In this module, you'll explore one of cybersecurity's most overlooked yet critical areas: secure storage and data retention. You'll discover that protecting data doesn't end once it's collected—organizations must also secure where data "sleeps," control how long it stays, and ensure it's properly destroyed when no longer needed. Through three comprehensive lessons, you'll learn about data states (at rest, in motion, and in use), examine storage technologies from RAID systems to cloud platforms like AWS S3, and understand why proper data retention policies can mean the difference between regulatory compliance and costly violations. You'll also investigate real-world breaches like the 2019 Capital One incident to see how storage misconfigurations—not sophisticated attacks—often cause the most devastating data exposures. By the end of this module, you'll have the knowledge to design secure storage strategies, implement proper backup and destruction procedures, and navigate the complex regulatory landscape that governs how organizations must handle sensitive information throughout its entire lifecycle.

Security Models and Design Principles

In this module, you'll explore the foundational security principles that transform cybersecurity from reactive patching into proactive defense architecture. You'll examine how principles like Zero Trust, least privilege, segregation of duties, and defense in depth work together to create resilient systems that assume breach and design accordingly. Through hands-on experience with SELinux policy enforcement, you'll see how these abstract principles translate into real-world access controls that limit attack surfaces and enforce mandatory security boundaries. You'll analyze major breaches like Target, Colonial Pipeline, and Equifax to understand how failures in these design principles led to catastrophic outcomes that proper implementation could have prevented. By the end of this module, you'll be able to evaluate organizational security postures, design layered defense strategies, and apply these principles to modern challenges like cloud security and remote work environments. This foundational knowledge will serve as the blueprint for every security decision you make throughout your career, helping you build systems that are secure by design rather than accident.

Cryptography Fundamentals

In this module, you'll explore cryptography as both a technical discipline and a business-critical function that underpins the entire digital economy. You'll master the fundamental differences between symmetric and asymmetric encryption systems, understanding not just how they work mathematically, but why hybrid approaches like those used in TLS have become essential for balancing security with performance. Through detailed analysis of real-world failures—from Adobe's catastrophic key reuse to LinkedIn's unsalted password hashes—you'll learn to identify cryptographic vulnerabilities and their business consequences. You'll examine the intricate trust relationships within Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and understand how failures like DigiNotar's compromise can cascade across entire digital ecosystems. By the end of this module, you'll be equipped to design cryptographic solutions that protect the four pillars of information assurance (confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation) while navigating the complex trade-offs between security, compliance requirements, and operational efficiency that define modern cybersecurity practice.

Network Protocols and Threats

In this module, you'll explore the foundational architecture of digital communication by examining how network protocols create both opportunity and vulnerability in modern systems. You'll master the OSI and TCP/IP models not as abstract frameworks, but as practical lenses for understanding where attacks occur and defenses must be positioned across network layers. Through detailed analysis of secure protocols like IPSec, TLS, and SSH, you'll learn how trust is established and maintained across hostile networks, while examining real-world failures like Heartbleed and BGP hijacking that expose the fragility of our interconnected systems. You'll investigate the complex security challenges of IPv6 adoption, where dual-stack environments create expanded attack surfaces, and analyze how emerging protocols must balance performance with security in an era of IoT proliferation and 5G networks. By the end of this module, you'll understand networks as living ecosystems where protocols evolve reactively to threats, and you'll be equipped to design layered defense strategies that account for the inherent vulnerabilities at each level of the network stack.