Why are we all here?

Our lives are heading deeper and deeper into cyberspace. Digital systems now process and store more of our personal data than ever before and are central to areas of critical national infrastructure.

Defending these systems is a significant challenge and one that we’ll explore in this introductory two-week course for the Ethical Hacking program. This forms part of the MSc Cyber Security online degree at Coventry University, delivered on FutureLearn.

This program comprises 10 weeks of study (five two-week short courses), taught right here on FutureLearn, and is followed by an additional period to submit an assessment – details of which can be found on the assessment tab of the program page.

This open course is designed to give you an idea of what to expect from the online learning experience and help you decide whether to enrol on the full program.

If you are studying this module at the same time as the Secure Design and Development program, you might notice there is overlap in some of the content. Although some concepts are relevant to multiple areas of cyber security, you will find that you will be studying them from different angles, and in different levels of depth in different modules.

This week

Through this week’s activities, you’ll explore the main principles of information security.

Before we can teach you how to hack, we need to make sure that you’re aware of the ethical and legal issues of ethical hacking, so we will also:

• Investigate some of the professional and ethical considerations of ethical hacking
• Explore the legislation relevant to cyber security and ethical hacking in particular

We’ll also start building your technical skills in order to prepare you for the practical hacking activities later in the program.

Meet the team

Your lead educators are Christo Panchev, senior lecturer in Cyber Security at Coventry University, Daniel Goldsmith, senior lecturer in the Institute of Coding at Coventry University, and Antal Goldschmidt, associate lecturer for this course and deputy course director for Ethical Hacking and Cyber Security at Coventry University.

You can follow your lead educators by selecting the links to their FutureLearn profile pages and selecting ‘follow’. That way, you’ll be able to see all the comments that they make.