Table of Contents
Introduction
Students in the University of the Cumberlands PhD program in Information Technology must take 20 courses to graduate, and complete their dissertation. Six of those courses make up the IT program core, and I am in those classes now. You also take 6 electives and then 12 courses focused on statistics, research design, etc., as you write your dissertation.
The second course I decided to take at University of the Cumberlands is ITS834 Emerging Threats and Countermeasures.
Syllabus
This course, like others at UC is 8 weeks long. It’s a fast 8 weeks with a couple hours worth of material each week including reading several papers, writing one of your own, writing a discussion board post and responding to your colleague’s posts.
Each week includes several topics but here’s a short breakdown of some of the major topics covered each week:
- Introduction and CIA (Confidentiality-Integrity-Accessibility) Triad
- Cybersecurity and Data Privacy
- Business Continuity and Contingency PLanning
- Cryptography and Threat Modeling
- Cyber Attacks and Incident Monitoring
- Access Control and Securing Networks
- Critical Infrastructure and Risk Assessment
- Cybersecurity Awareness and Management
- Malicious Code, Malware and Ethics
Impressions
I’m really enjoying this course. Each week I have new ideas for my dissertation or other thoughts of papers that would be interesting to write. The material is engaging and the professor (Dr Heard) is very responsive. When I had an issue seeing the Discussion Board he responded and fixed it in literally minutes.
Conclusion
If you’re interested in cybersecurity either from an offensive or a defensive perspective I think you’ll enjoy this course. Since it’s required for all PhD IT students they’ve gone to great pains to make it general enough that everyone will get something out of it, regardless of your IT specialty.