BSY – Introduction to Security

This course teaches students cybersecurity fundamentals by combining penetration testing with defense strategies. Using an innovative blend of lectures and practical tutorials, students engage in highly interactive classes. Each new concept is immediately reinforced with hands-on exercises, allowing students to apply what they have learned in real time.

Throughout the semester, the course integrates both attack and defense techniques. In realistic scenarios accessed via a cyber range, students will practice a wide range of skills: reconnaissance, scanning, exploiting vulnerabilities, privilege escalation, lateral movement, exfiltration, malware analysis, network security forensics, binary reversing, log analysis, intrusion detection systems, honeypots, and applications of machine learning and AI in cybersecurity.

All course information can be found on the class webpage

• Basic concepts in cybersecurity, an overview of protocols and their properties
• Network reconnaissance, scanning, and basic network analysis
• Attacking devices in the network, vulnerabilities, exploits
• Detection of attacks, hardening user access, host-based IDS
• Virtualization, sandboxing, honeypots, and threat intelligence
• Privilege escalation, persistence, side-channel attacks
• Binary exploitation & secure coding
• Binary reversing, static & dynamic code analysis
• Malware, C&C channels, denial of service attacks
• Malware detection, packet analysis, netflows, ML for cybersecurity
• Web attacks, browser security, practical aspects of cryptography
• Security of mobile devices

• Zalewski, M. (2005) Silence on the wire: a field guide to passive reconnaissance and indirect attacks
• Lyon, G. F. (2008) Nmap Network Scanning: The Official Nmap Project Guide to Network Discovery and Security Scanning
• Sanders, C. (2020) Intrusion Detection Honeypots: Detection Through Deception. Applied Network Defense.
• Chappel, L. (2012) Wireshark Network Analysis.
• Anderson, R. (2020) Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems
• Stuttard, D., & Pinto, M. (2011). The web application hacker's handbook: Finding and exploiting security flaws. John Wiley & Sons.