About This Course:

This is the 8th course in the intermediate, undergraduate-level offering that makes up the larger Cybersecurity Fundamentals MicroBachelors Program. We recommend taking them in order, unless you have a background in these areas already and feel comfortable skipping ahead.

What You’ll Learn:

Discover credentials utilizing hash dumpsPerform pass-the-hash attacksDocument results of the penetration testUtilize currently exploited systems to gain access to others.Configure exploitation tools to pivot through a target environment

Meet Your Instructor:

Aspen Olmsted

Adjunct Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering Aspen Olmsted is an adjunct faculty member in the New York University Tandon School of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering department. Aspen's fulltime job is as an assistant professor and Graduate program director at the College of Charleston. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of South Carolina. Before his academic career, he was CEO of Alliance Software Corporation. Alliance Software developed N-Tier enterprise applications for the performing arts and humanities market. Dr Olmsted’s research focus is on the development of algorithms and architectures for distributed enterprise solutions that can guarantee security and correctness while maintaining high-availability. In his Secure Data Engineering Lab, Aspen mentors over a dozen graduate and undergraduate students each year

About This Course:

This is the 8th course in the intermediate, undergraduate-level offering that makes up the larger Cybersecurity Fundamentals MicroBachelors Program. We recommend taking them in order, unless you have a background in these areas already and feel comfortable skipping ahead.

What You’ll Learn:

Apply methodology to penetration tests to ensure they are consistent, reproducible, rigorous, and under quality control.Analyze the results from automated testing tools to validate findings, determine their business impact, and eliminate false positives.Discover key application flaws.Use programming to create testing and exploitation scripts during a penetration test.Discover and exploit SQL Injection flaws to determine true risk to the victim organization.Create configurations and test payloads within other web attacks.Fuzz potential inputs for injection attacks.Explain the impact of exploitation of application flaws.Analyze traffic between the client and server application using tools.Discover and exploit Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.

Meet Your Instructor:

Aspen Olmsted

Adjunct Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering Aspen Olmsted is an adjunct faculty member in the New York University Tandon School of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering department. Aspen's fulltime job is as an assistant professor and Graduate program director at the College of Charleston. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of South Carolina. Before his academic career, he was CEO of Alliance Software Corporation. Alliance Software developed N-Tier enterprise applications for the performing arts and humanities market. Dr Olmsted’s research focus is on the development of algorithms and architectures for distributed enterprise solutions that can guarantee security and correctness while maintaining high-availability. In his Secure Data Engineering Lab, Aspen mentors over a dozen graduate and undergraduate students each year

About This Course:

This is the 6th course in the intermediate, undergraduate-level offering that makes up the larger Cybersecurity Fundamentals MicroBachelors Program. We recommend taking them in order, unless you have a background in these areas already and feel comfortable skipping ahead.

What You’ll Learn:

Explain what information is collected and analyzed through network security monitoring, and why monitoring is importantDefine network security monitoringSummarize the policies used in network security monitoringDefine an Intrusion Detection System/Intrusion Prevention System, and provide a real-world analogy for an IDSDefine the base rate fallacy and summarize an exampleSummarize the options for deploying an IDSDescribe common strategies attackers use to evade an IDSList potential indicators of a security attackDefine honeypots and honeynets and list their benefits to organizationsSummarize the goals of a firewallList and define four types of firewallsSummarize an example of a filtering ruleExplain the primary function of NATSummarize the advantages and disadvantages of proxy gatewaysExplain the process for setting up firewalls using IPTables and Netfilter in LinuxList the steps in an incoming packet’s journey through a Linux firewallSummarize the challenges that led to the development of IPv6 and explain how IPv6 addresses those challengesList the differences in IPv4 and IPv6 services and headersDifferentiate between IPv4 and IPv6 address formatsList and define IPv6 address typesList the differences between IPv4 and IPv6 address provisioningList the differences between DHCPv4 and DHCPv6Summarize dual-stack techniques for IPv4 and IPv6 devicesIdentify security threats common to IPv4 and IPv6, as well as threats exclusive to IPv6Describe how reconnaissance methods will change under IPv6List tools that can be use to compromise IPv6 networksDescribe the security considerations needed in dual-stack host environments

Meet Your Instructor:

Aspen Olmsted

Adjunct Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering Aspen Olmsted is an adjunct faculty member in the New York University Tandon School of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering department. Aspen's fulltime job is as an assistant professor and Graduate program director at the College of Charleston. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of South Carolina. Before his academic career, he was CEO of Alliance Software Corporation. Alliance Software developed N-Tier enterprise applications for the performing arts and humanities market. Dr Olmsted’s research focus is on the development of algorithms and architectures for distributed enterprise solutions that can guarantee security and correctness while maintaining high-availability. In his Secure Data Engineering Lab, Aspen mentors over a dozen graduate and undergraduate students each year

About This Course:

This is the 5th course in the intermediate, undergraduate-level offering that makes up the larger Cybersecurity Fundamentals MicroBachelors Program. We recommend taking them in order, unless you have a background in these areas already and feel comfortable skipping ahead.

What You’ll Learn:

Define and apply a substitution cipherDefine cryptanalysisExplain at a high level the process by which a plaintext message is encrypted, transmitted, and decrypted.Describe at least two strategies for breaking an encryption schemeIdentify the differences between public key encryption, symmetric key encryption, and hashingList and summarize the characteristics of good ciphersDescribe the vulnerabilities of stream ciphersDefine AES and explain why it is recommended over 3DESDefine cipher block chainingList the steps in creating an RSA public/private key pairExplain why RSA is secureDefine message integrity and explain how it is ensuredDefine IPSec and list its servicesDefine authentication header and ESPExplain the primary goal of IKE and describe its sub-protocolsSummarize the five steps of IPSec OperationSummarize the history of SSLExplain how closure alerts can prevent a truncation attackIdentify the protocols that make up the SSL architectureDescribe how SSL/TLS provides protected channelsState the differences between IPSec and SSL VPN connectionsExplain why it’s important to consider Layer 2 securityDefine common Layer 2 attacksIdentify tools used in Layer 2 attacksDescribe countermeasures to Layer 2 attacks and security best practices to prevent attacksExplain the differences between the 2.4GHz and 5GHz spectrumsProvide definitions of basic wireless termsExplain how 802.11ac differs from earlier 802.11 standardsIdentify and define the types of 802.11 framesList and define the states of 802.11 sessionsList the steps in establishing an 802.11 sessionSummarize the existing wireless security protocols and state which protocols should not be usedSummarize WPA, WPA Enterprise, and generalized WiFi attacks

Meet Your Instructor:

Aspen Olmsted

Adjunct Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering Aspen Olmsted is an adjunct faculty member in the New York University Tandon School of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering department. Aspen's fulltime job is as an assistant professor and Graduate program director at the College of Charleston. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of South Carolina. Before his academic career, he was CEO of Alliance Software Corporation. Alliance Software developed N-Tier enterprise applications for the performing arts and humanities market. Dr Olmsted’s research focus is on the development of algorithms and architectures for distributed enterprise solutions that can guarantee security and correctness while maintaining high-availability. In his Secure Data Engineering Lab, Aspen mentors over a dozen graduate and undergraduate students each year

About This Course:

This is the 4th course in the intermediate, undergraduate-level offering that makes up the larger Cybersecurity Fundamentals MicroBachelors Program. We recommend taking them in order, unless you have a background in these areas already and feel comfortable skipping ahead.

What You’ll Learn:

Describe how “social engineering” can be used to compromise securityDefine the CIA triadIdentify and plan to manage risks in common situationsDefine a threat tree and threat matrix and explain how they are usedDefine an attack tree, explain how boolean and continuous node values are used in attack trees, and demonstrate how an attack tree can be used to determine vulnerabilitiesExplain why it is important for network engineers to understand cyber attack strategies.List and summarize the stages of network attack methodologyIdentify the information an attacker might collect during network reconnaissanceDescribe at least two “low tech” ways of performing reconnaissance on a targetPerform a WHOIS query and extract the IP address of a DNS serverList at least three publicly available tools used for gathering information on targetsDefine port scanning and describe the process used to determine whether a port is openDefine a proxy serverDefine IP spoofing, ingress filtering, and session hijackingDefine a Denial of Service attack and explain the difference between a DoS and DDoS attackState the relationship between DoS attacks and geopolitical eventsList at least two vulnerability attacks used in DoS attacksDefine SYN flooding and explain how it can be protected againstDescribe what happens during a standard DDoS attackExplain how DNS poisoning can be used in phishing attacksDescribe how URLs can be obfuscated to make a phishing attack more likely to succeedList at least two tools used to assess vulnerabilities in networksSummarize the typical goals of post-exploitation activityDescribe the strategies attackers use to maintain access to a compromised systemDefine trojans, viruses, worms, and blended threatsList the typical objectives of trojan creatorsDefine rootkitsGive examples of common uses of NetcatDefine wrappersSummarize common data exfiltration methodsSummarize how attackers can remove evidence of system compromise in Windows and Unix systems

Meet Your Instructor:

Aspen Olmsted

Adjunct Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering Aspen Olmsted is an adjunct faculty member in the New York University Tandon School of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering department. Aspen's fulltime job is as an assistant professor and Graduate program director at the College of Charleston. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of South Carolina. Before his academic career, he was CEO of Alliance Software Corporation. Alliance Software developed N-Tier enterprise applications for the performing arts and humanities market. Dr Olmsted’s research focus is on the development of algorithms and architectures for distributed enterprise solutions that can guarantee security and correctness while maintaining high-availability. In his Secure Data Engineering Lab, Aspen mentors over a dozen graduate and undergraduate students each year

About This Course:

This is the 3rd course in the intermediate, undergraduate-level offering that makes up the larger Cybersecurity Fundamentals MicroBachelors Program. We recommend taking them in order, unless you have a background in these areas already and feel comfortable skipping ahead.

What You’ll Learn:

Define Same-Origin PolicyDescribe SQL Injection and Common defensesDescribe Cross Site Request Forgery (XSRF) and Common DefensesDescribe Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and Common DefensesDiscuss different definitions of PrivacyDefine anonymityDefine contextual integrityDescribe Differential PrivacyDescribe Mix NetworksDescribe how Tor Provides AnonymityDefine Digital CertificatesDescribe the Trusted Platform Module (TPM)Describe DNS AmplificationDistinguish between Watermarking and SteganographyDescribe How Bit-Coin Prevents an Attacker from Faking a ChainDescribe Why Minors Validate TransactionsDescribe Why BitCoin Mining Consumes So Much Power and Some AlternativesDescribe Threats to the BitCoin EcoSystem

Meet Your Instructor:

Aspen Olmsted

Adjunct Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering Aspen Olmsted is an adjunct faculty member in the New York University Tandon School of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering department. Aspen's fulltime job is as an assistant professor and Graduate program director at the College of Charleston. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of South Carolina. Before his academic career, he was CEO of Alliance Software Corporation. Alliance Software developed N-Tier enterprise applications for the performing arts and humanities market. Dr Olmsted’s research focus is on the development of algorithms and architectures for distributed enterprise solutions that can guarantee security and correctness while maintaining high-availability. In his Secure Data Engineering Lab, Aspen mentors over a dozen graduate and undergraduate students each year

About This Course:

This is the 2nd course in the intermediate, undergraduate-level offering that makes up the larger Cybersecurity Fundamentals MicroBachelors Program. We recommend taking them in order, unless you have a background in these areas already and feel comfortable skipping ahead.

What You’ll Learn:

Describe Strengths and Weaknesses of Data Encryption Standard (DES)Describe Strengths and Weaknesses of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)Describe Public Key CryptographyDescribe Asymmetric Key AlgorithmsDefine Hash FunctionsDescribe Public Key SignaturesDescribe the Benefits of the Different Types of AuthenticationDefine access controlApply four types of access control (Discretionary, Mandatory, Role Based, and Unix/Linux File Access Control)Describe the use of the SetUID permission in Unix/LinuxAnalyze an access control scenario using an Access Control MatrixDifferentiate between ACL and CapabilitiesDescribe the use of a Reference MonitorDescribe the Security Mechanisms built into Chromium OSGive Examples of Covert Channels including both Timing Channels and Storage ChannelsDescribe the Purpose of an Operating System (OS)Differentiate between Type 1 and Type 2 HypervisorsDescribe Containers and their PurposeDescribe Sandbox Computation

Meet Your Instructor:

Aspen Olmsted

Adjunct Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering Aspen Olmsted is an adjunct faculty member in the New York University Tandon School of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering department. Aspen's fulltime job is as an assistant professor and Graduate program director at the College of Charleston. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of South Carolina. Before his academic career, he was CEO of Alliance Software Corporation. Alliance Software developed N-Tier enterprise applications for the performing arts and humanities market. Dr Olmsted’s research focus is on the development of algorithms and architectures for distributed enterprise solutions that can guarantee security and correctness while maintaining high-availability. In his Secure Data Engineering Lab, Aspen mentors over a dozen graduate and undergraduate students each year

Program Overview

This program will teach you core cybersecurity competencies including information security, network security and penetration testing. This exposure will allow the student to better understand the different opportunities available for employment in the cybersecurity sector. Demand for cybersecurity is exploding in both the United States and worldwide. The courses will utilize both python scripting and tool usage to give the students hands-on experience penetrating and defending systems. In addition to the applied cybersecurity labs, students will also gain an understanding of the complexity in defending business systems both today and in the future. Students looking for careers in information technology, risk management, cyber defense, cyber threats, cybercrime, digital forensics, incident response, IT Security, computer networking, cybersecurity risks, information assurance, intrusion detection, risk assessment, security analysis, and vulnerability management can all benefit from the material in the courses.

What you will learn

  • Apply a security mindset while remaining ethical.
  • Implement security design principles.
  • Explain the core concepts of access control.
  • Implement reference monitors.
  • Apply security policies that are commonly used in modern operating systems.
  • Analyze the security of a basic secure system.
  • Explain virtualization and the impact on security and efficiency.
  • 8. Think and work like an ethical penetration tester, implementing a repeatable and mature methodology that is tailored for each assessment.
  • With a given target, successfully identify vulnerabilities, score their risk, and explain mitigations.
  • Responsibly disclose findings in a professional report that can be used to recreate the exploit, explain the impact to the target, and prioritize each finding.
  • Enumerate target hosts, domains, exposures, and attack surface.
  • Identify flaws and vulnerabilities in applications, websites, networks, systems, protocols, and configurations using both manual techniques and assistive tools.
  • Reverse engineer compiled applications to discover exploitable weaknesses.
  • Write new exploits to test various types of vulnerabilities on clients, against servers, and to escalate privileges.
  • Demonstrate the fundamentals of secure network design.
  • Understand the issues involved with providing secure networks.
  • Analyze underlying cryptography required for secure communications, authorization and authorization.
  • Enumerate the issues involved with providing secure networks.

Courses List

1
Information Security - Introduction to Information Security

Course Details
Learn the fundamentals of information security, including Security Design Principles, Threat Modeling and Security Policy.

2
Information Security - Authentication and Access Control

Course Details
Learn more fundamentals of information security, including Introduction to Cryptography, Authentication, Access Control and Containerization.

3
Information Security - Advanced topics

Course Details
Learn more fundamentals of information security, including Injection Attacks and Defenses, Privacy and Anonymity Software Validity and Rights, Cryptocurrency.

4
Network Security - Protocols

Course Details
Learn more fundamentals of network security, including cryptographic algorithms used in networking protocols, TLS/SSL, IPSec Layer 2 Security and Wireless Security.

5
Network Security - Advanced Topics

Course Details
Learn advanced topics in network security, including Security Monitoring, Perimeter Security, IPv6 and IPv6 Security.

6
Penetration Testing - Discovering Vulnerabilities

Course Details
Learn fundamentals of penetration testing, including an Introduction to Penetration Testing Methodologies, Recognisance and Enumeration for Penetration Testers, Scanning and Vulnerability Enumeration.

7
Penetration Testing - Exploitation

Course Details
Learn exploitation phase of penetration testing, including the foundations of explorations, application debugging, reverse engineering, exploitation development and web application exploitation.

8
Penetration Testing - Post Exploitation

Course Details
Learn post-exploitation phases of penetration testing, including Owning, Pivoting, Privilege Escalation and other advanced penetration testing topics.

9
Network Security - Introduction to Network Security

Course Details
Learn fundamentals of network security, including a deep dive into how networks are attacked by malicious users.

Meet your instructors

Justin Cappos

Associate Professor at New York University Justin Cappos is a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at New York University. Justin's research philosophy focuses on improving real world systems, often by addressing issues that arise in practical deployments.

Aspen Olmsted

Adjunct Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering Aspen Olmsted is an adjunct faculty member in the New York University Tandon School of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering department. Aspen's fulltime job is as an assistant professor and Graduate program director at the College of Charleston. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of South Carolina. Before his academic career, he was CEO of Alliance Software Corporation. Alliance Software developed N-Tier enterprise applications for the performing arts and humanities market. Dr Olmsted’s research focus is on the development of algorithms and architectures for distributed enterprise solutions that can guarantee security and correctness while maintaining high-availability. In his Secure Data Engineering Lab, Aspen mentors over a dozen graduate and undergraduate students each year
Program Overview
This program will teach you core computer science competencies in programming and data structures. Understanding how programming works is essential in many technical disciplines such Information Technology, Software Engineering, Cybersecurity, and Computer Science. The courses utilize the C++ programming languages to establish a solid foundation in programming and data structures for the students. Students gain valuable hands-on experience programming solutions to problems in the labs. I the labs, students will practice their core programming skills and will also develop many advanced data structures including, hashtables, sorting and search algorithms, binary trees, AVL trees, graph algorithms and many more advanced computing topics. In addition to the applied programming labs, students will also gain an understanding of computational complexity through the analysis of the data structures and programs that are developed.
What you will learn
  • Identify and explain a programming development lifecycle, including planning, analysis, design, development, and maintenance.
  • Demonstrate a basic understanding of object-oriented programming by using structures and classes in software projects.
  • Use object-oriented programming techniques to develop executable programs that include elements such as inheritance and polymorphism.
  • Document and format code in a consistent manner.
  • Apply basic searching and sorting algorithms in software design.
  • Apply single-and multi-dimensional arrays in software.
  • Use a symbolic debugger to find and fix runtime and logical errors in software.
  • Demonstrate a basic understanding of programming methodologies, including object oriented, structured, and procedural programming.
  • Describe the phases of program translation from source code to executable code.
  • Design and develop programs that utilize linked lists to store data internally.
  • Design and develop programs that utilize stacks and queues to manage collections of data.
  • Design and develop programs that recursion to solve problems that can be expressed with recurrence.
  • Utilize binary search trees and balanced trees to implement fast retrieval of data from a collection of data stored in memory.

Course List

1
Introduction to Programming in C++

Course Details
Learn the fundamentals of programming in the C++ programming language, including iteration, decision branching, data types and expression.

2
Advanced Programming in C++

Course Details
Learn the advanced programming topics in the C++ programming language, including functions, computation complexity, arrays and strings.

3
Introduction to Data Structures

Course Details
Learn the advanced programming topics in the C++ programming language, including pointers, dynamic storage, recursion, searching, and sorting.

4
Advanced Data Structures

Course Details
Learn the advanced programming topics in the C++ programming language, including file processing, linked lists, stacks, queues, trees, binary search trees and tree balancing algorithms.

Meet Your Instructors

Aspen Olmsted

Adjunct Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering Aspen Olmsted is an adjunct faculty member in the New York University Tandon School of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering department. Aspen's fulltime job is as an assistant professor and Graduate program director at the College of Charleston. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of South Carolina. Before his academic career, he was CEO of Alliance Software Corporation. Alliance Software developed N-Tier enterprise applications for the performing arts and humanities market. Dr Olmsted’s research focus is on the development of algorithms and architectures for distributed enterprise solutions that can guarantee security and correctness while maintaining high-availability. In his Secure Data Engineering Lab, Aspen mentors over a dozen graduate and undergraduate students each year

Itay Tal

Industry Assistant Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering Tel-Aviv University 2005 M.Sc., Computer Science Tel-Aviv University 1998 B.Sc., Computer Science and Mathematics

About This Course:

This is the 4th course in the intermediate, undergraduate-level offering that makes up the larger Programming and Data Structures MicroBachelors program. We recommend taking them in order, unless you have a background in these areas already and feel comfortable skipping ahead.

  1. Introduction to Programming in C++
  2. Advanced Programming in C++
  3. Introduction to Data Structures
  4. Advanced Data Structures

These topics build upon the learnings that are taught in the introductory-level Computer Science Fundamentals MicroBachelors program, offered by the same instructor.

This is a self-paced course that continues in the development of C++ programming skills. Among the topics covered is the development of more advanced command-line programs that utilize file processing, linked lists, stacks, queues, trees, binary search trees, and tree balancing algorithms to solve problems. Several implements are presented in the development of each data structure, including hash maps, AVL, and red and black trees. Students learn how to utilize and program these data structures through the lectures and the labs. C++ programming material is presented over eight weeks of interactive lectures with quizzes to assess your understanding of the material. Students will experience hands-on practice writing C++ programs through twenty-two lab challenges.

This course focuses on the efficiency of different data structures to solve various computational problems. A data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, and the functions or operations that can be applied to the data. The data structures and algorithms learned in this class are the foundation of modern programming.

What You’ll Learn:

  1. Design and develop programs that utilize linked lists to store data internally.
  2. Design and develop programs that utilize stacks and queues to manage collections of data
  3. Utilize binary search trees and balanced trees to implement fast retrieval of data from a collection of data stored in memory.

Meet Your Instructor:

Aspen Olmsted

Adjunct Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering Aspen Olmsted is an adjunct faculty member in the New York University Tandon School of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering department. Aspen's fulltime job is as an assistant professor and Graduate program director at the College of Charleston. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of South Carolina. Before his academic career, he was CEO of Alliance Software Corporation. Alliance Software developed N-Tier enterprise applications for the performing arts and humanities market. Dr Olmsted’s research focus is on the development of algorithms and architectures for distributed enterprise solutions that can guarantee security and correctness while maintaining high-availability. In his Secure Data Engineering Lab, Aspen mentors over a dozen graduate and undergraduate students each year