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Introduction to practical cybersecurity

Published on August 30, 2018   37 min

A selection of talks on Technology & Operations

Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hello, and welcome to our sixth part series on practicals cybersecurity. My name is Claudiu Popa, and I will be your guide on this first leg of the journey.
0:12
My three colleagues and I are excited to unveil the most important and interesting aspects of cybersecurity. We'll explore threats, risk, compliance, and many other topics to provide you with unprecedented access to a concise set of professional techniques for minimizing risk, protecting assets, safeguarding online identities, and managing digital technologies. Thanks for joining us. On a personal note, you've chosen what I find to be an endlessly fascinating topic and one that can be infinitely complex. But it's only going to be fun if it's clear and concise. So, we'll try to get right to the point and talk about what is cybersecurity. According to Wikipedia, cybersecurity maps to computer security. Computer security or IT security is the protection of computer systems from theft and damage to their hardware, software, information as well as from disruption or misdirection of the services they provide. Cybersecurity includes controlling physical access to the hardware as well as protecting against harm that may come via network access, data, and code injection. Also due to malpractice by operators whether intentional or accidental, IT security is susceptible to being tricked into deviating from secure procedures through various methods. Now, that's a pretty good definition, but it's got a lot of technical language that really needs to be unpacked. A lot of that is beyond the scope of this first slide, but I wanted to mention that from a cybersecurity perspective, that term has been around for the past 20 or so years. It came, it picked up some momentum, it went away as being somewhat uncool, it was brought back, and it's made a strong resurgence in the past few years. So, we're basically stuck with it right now. Generally speaking, cybersecurity means the protection of information assets and all the devices that store them. So, that could be computers, that could be the Internet itself, it could be hard drives, it could be MP3 players, it could be the entire Internet of things, and all these connected devices. So that's the general term for cybersecurity. But ultimately, what it's all about is the valuable, squishy, yummy stuff inside, and that is information. The information is what brings value to organizations and to economies nowadays. That's the real reason we put together this course, and I'm excited to explore it with you. As a certified security professional, I've had many years of training and preparation. Even decades later, I still come across new situations and scenarios that I've never encountered before. So, it's not surprising that the prevention of data loss and breach response, for example, are very difficult topics for many people. In fact, they're completely counterintuitive. The reality is that we live in a new age and it's an age that's changing fast. These things need to be intuitive to be effective. In fact, if they're not easily understood, they're just not going to stick with you and you won't be able to keep up. For us, that's one of the challenges of building a program that will not be obsolete immediately after we record it or even years later. I'm happy to say that the way we put together this program will approach cybersecurity from the top down. You will learn fundamental concepts. You'll learn how to think about data protection, about asset protection, about computer security, and digital technologies in a way that will allow you to move in step with changes. Of course, you'll be able to keep up with whatever the news brings on a daily basis.