Welcome to Network Security

Over the next four weeks, you will learn why you could be a target for hackers, how hackers may try to breach your network, how you can protect your network from these attacks, and how to recover from an attack.

This course is being presented by Jeff Minakata. Jeff has over 19 years of experience of working within the IT industry as an ethical hacker. He holds different qualifications, including network certifications and engineering and security certifications. Jeff is also an online educator for ethical hacking, network security, open-source intelligence, and building games.

This course contains several practical demonstrations for you to follow along with. The best way to learn is by doing. We would like you to engage with what has been demonstrated or discussed, we will indicate this with ‘over to you’.

Course roadmap

This course is designed to give you the knowledge and the skills to identify, mitigate and prevent cyber security related issues. You will gain this knowledge and acquire these skills over the four weeks. The course structure is shown in the roadmap below.

Technical requirements

To complete this course, you will need:

• Windows 8 or 10 / Linux operating system / OS X or higher
• Administrator access on your machine and the ability to install software
• At least 10GB free on your machine

Toward the end of the course, you will learn how to use the Trace Labs Virtual Machine. If you want to install this software to your device, you will need a minimum of 40GB of free space.

Learning outcomes this week

We will start this week by focusing on physical security and some best practices.

By the end of this week, you will be able to:

• describe the importance of protecting networks from attacks
• identify risks to a network
• describe DDOS attacks
• describe the five steps used by hackers to target an individual
• identify how to protect a network at each step of a hacker’s five steps
• identify the role of social engineering in opening a network to vulnerability
• identify the physical vulnerability in a network’s security.
• understand Man in the Middle attacks

Working together

For this course, it is important that you take the time to share comments and interact with others on the course. The educators from your videos will not be providing feedback as you move through the content, but you and other users should work together to discuss what you are learning and support each other where possible.

Next steps

When you are ready, you can mark this step as complete and move on to the next step, ‘How Will You Be Assessed?’