-: In this section of the course,
we're going to focus on the baseline knowledge
that you need to understand
before we can start digging into all of the
technical pieces of cyber security.
Cyber security is hard.
There's always going to be a friction
that exists between security and convenience.
Think about at your house.
When you set up your wireless network
what kind of password did you use?
Did you use a short password
like puppy or baseball?
Or did you use something that was much longer
and more complicated and difficult to remember?
Well, if you had a long, hard,
and complicated password,
your network is going to be much more secure,
but it's also much less convenient.
Think about it.
If your friend comes over and says
can I connect to your Wi-Fi?
You've got to go type in this long,
complicated password each time
and that's just one example
of the challenge that we have
between security and convenience.
As people, we want convenience,
but when we have convenience
we lose out on security.
To increase security,
we have to make things a bit more challenging
and more difficult,
but, again, that takes away from convenience.
This is the balance
that we're always dealing with
inside our organizations.
As organizations have fought with this challenge,
there are things that have went out
in this convenience sector
that have given us less security.
As we look at that,
that's one of the reasons
why we continue to have cyber attacks
and data breaches to this day.
Just last year, there was 1.3 million dollars spent
per data breach by major companies.
This is an amazing fact
and an astounding figure,
but the reason is because we have this trade-off.
We have to make things easy for our users
to use them on a daily basis
but challenging enough that hackers can't get in.
Now, in this section of the course
we're going to talk about those foundations.
Things like the CIA triad,
the triple As of security,
and much more,
but before we do that,
we have to define two terms.
This first is information security.
Information security is the act of protecting data
and information from unauthorized access,
unlawful modification and disruption,
disclosure, and corruption, and destruction.
Simply put, when we talk about information security,
we're talking about the data
that the systems are holding,
not the systems themselves.
Which brings us to our second definition,
information systems security.
Information systems security
is the act of protecting the systems
that hold and process our critical data.
That can be a computer,
a server, a network device,
or even your smartphone.
If we're talking about protecting the data itself,
it's information security,
but if we're talking about the devices that hold the data,
then we're talking about information systems security.
Now, as we go through the rest of section one,
we're going to cover a lot of different topics.
We're not going to cover them in depth, though.
We're just going to scratch the surface here in section one.
We'll return to them in depth
in sections two, three, four, and beyond,
as we go and get into the level of detail
that you'll need to be successful in this class
and on the certification exam.