Data breaches occur nearly every day. From very large retailers, down to your fantasy football website, and anywhere in between, they have been compromised in some way. How did the attackers get in? What did they do with the data they compromised? What should I be concerned with in my own business or my systems? This course is the second course in the Practical Computer Security. It will discuss types of threats and attack vectors commonly seen in today’s environment. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but threats are all over the place! This course isn’t designed to insight fear that there is no hope for keeping systems and business secure, but rather educate you on how attacks are carried out so that you have a better sense of what to look out for in your business or with your systems.
About the Instructor
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From the course by University of Colorado System
Cyber Threats and Attack Vectors
1 rating
University of Colorado System
Cyber Threats and Attack Vectors
1 rating
Course 2 of 4 in the Specialization Cybersecurity for Business
From the lesson
THREATS AND ATTACK VECTORS IN COMPUTER SECURITY
Welcome! This week we'll explore users and user based attacks. User based attacks are common because it may be easier to compromise a human rather than a computer.
Meet the Instructors
Greg WilliamsLecturer
Department of Computer Science
Hi everyone, my name is Greg Williams. I'm a lecturer in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. I wanted to introduce you to myself for a few minutes, and tell you a little bit about these courses that you're going to be taking, and my passions in computers.
It was running DOS at the time. I changed the time on it because he couldn't figure it out. So then, when I in high school start taking some C programming classes, and then in college, my undergrad, I got my information technology degree. And then, got my masters in engineering and information assurance. That's a computer science degree.
My passions in computer security are really identifying malicious content, and helping identify breaches. My thesis was on identifying or identifying external data breaches.
I'm sorry, internal data breaches from external networks. The paper was actually called External Detection for Internal Data Breeches, that's what it was.
Anyway, going back to where I came from in security, I loved or I still do love playing video games. And back in the early 2000s, me and my friends would play Battlefield 1942. And there was a Desert Siege MOD, that came out and I would rewrite the memory locations, on the fly, to turn the enemies a different color, so I could identify them easier. So yes, I was a hacker back then.
But that really started me into my computer security career because, I was able to see that other people, like myself, had an advantage. And how do I stop other people from gaining that advantage? So now, I still play video games all the time. Love playing first-person shooters like Battlefield. Within the past week, I played Battlefield 1 and Battlefield 4 and like
After the course, that is, after you've completed it, then we'll set up a channel or something like that. Anyway, So I've been the information security officer here at the university, and the HIPAA security officer. But my passion now is being able to apply computer security into the systems that I managed. So being the director of operations which includes telecom, it includes all networking, it includes infrastructure for a what we would call medium size university which is 13,000 students. It gives me the opportunity to innovate again. We're doing some really cool things. So I'm going to take you into the data center right now, where we're going to just look over a few of the things that get me really excited about computer security and also system management. But before we do that, what I want you to understand is that everything that you're going to learn In these courses, if you're just taking the system management and security specialization, or if you're taking the practical computer security specialization. What I want you to understand is that, this is practical knowledge that I've had from years of experience. I live and breathe this stuff every day. You're going to walk into the data center here in a second and see that this stuff really does exist. This is really what I'm putting into practice, not just theory. My teams live and breathe this stuff too, so it's a combination of learning all the time but also practicing. And I hope that you see that throughout these classes. Let's go take a look at the data center. Okay, this is our primary data center.
We have a raised-floor system here. Underneath the floor is 24 inches of space. What that does is that allows cold air from the crack units behind me here to be pushed down through the floor and cold air going up. What that does is that pushes the hot air up to the ceiling. The ceiling in this room is around 17 feet tall.
We have quite a few standalone servers, but let's take you into where we have a lot of rack mount units. This is one of our newer racks. Each one of the racks here, contains almost half a million dollars worth of IT equipment.
Systems like these run, and these down here run our media departments servers and they store video on them.
This is our SDN Stack, software-defined networking. This is one of the really cool bleeding edge or cutting edge technologies, that is out on the market today. It's actually CISCO ACI. What it does is it works with virtualization and physical systems to software, well, based on the software, route packets back and forth and do microsegmentation on the network. It's actually the core of our network, not which many universities have at the moment.
Down at the bottom we have some of our virtualization architecture. We have storage in this cabinet.
Like I said in the previous couple of minutes ago, this is just our primary data center. We have four data centers on campus. Some have more equipment in them, some have less. We also have 54 buildings on campus. Each one of them, look around like this. This is our networking row.
Each one of these racks, or each one of these red wires goes to a port somewhere in the building. Orange wires go directly to servers or other internal architecture.
This is our core router. Each one of these in here go to a building. Each building on campus is dual connected, meaning that if somebody cuts one of the fibers, the other one kicks in.
We have more standalone servers and network architecture in the back and than even more, we could keep on going. But, what I want you to understand out of the entire course, as you're thinking about these videos and your'e watching these lectures and
doing the work, think about how you are implementing this technology or how you want to learn this technology for an organization. Feel free to email me, I'll be more than happy to take a look at whatever you have and help you out if I can.
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