Cybersecurity Course Schedule Fall 2026

This course explores the most important elements beyond technology that shape the playing field on which cybersecurity problems emerge and are managed. The course emphasizes how ethical, legal, and economic frameworks enable and constrain security technologies and policies. It introduces some of the most important macro-elements (such as national security considerations and interests of nation-states) and micro-elements (such as behavioral economic insights into how people understand and interact with security features). Specific topics include policymaking, business models, legal frameworks, national security considerations, ethical issues, standards making, and the roles of users, government, and industry.

This course provides a comprehensive foundation in modern cybersecurity principles, technologies, and practices. Designed for students from technical and non-technical backgrounds, it covers core concepts such as confidentiality, integrity, availability, risk, threat modeling, and adversarial thinking. The course explores key domains including networks, operating systems, cryptography, identity and access management, security operations, governance, and emerging technologies. Through lectures, discussions, exercises, and case studies, students learn to analyze cybersecurity holistically. A final project applies these skills to assess a real-world system, organization, or incident.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning is a rapidly growing field at the intersection of computer science and statistics concerned with finding patterns in data. It is responsible for tremendous advances in technology, from personalized product recommendations to speech recognition in cell phones. This course provides a broad introduction to the key ideas in machine learning, with a focus on applications and concepts relevant to cybersecurity. The emphasis will be on intuition and practical examples rather than theoretical results, though some experience with probability, statistics, and linear algebra will be important.

Introduction to networking and security as applied to networks. Exercises cover network programming in a language of the student's choice, understanding and analyzing packet traces using tools like wireshark and mitmproxy, as well as applying security principles to analyze and determine network security. After this course, the student will have a fundamental understanding of networking, TLS and security as it applies to networked systems.

This survey of operating system security compares approaches to security taken among several modern operating systems. The course will teach how to conceptualize design issues, principles, and good practices in securing systems in today’s increasingly diverse and complex computing ecosystem, which extends from things and personal devices to enterprises, with processing increasingly in the cloud. We will approach operating systems individually and then build on them so that students learn techniques for establishing trust across a set of interoperating systems.

This course provides a hands-on foundation in securing cloud environments across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Students learn to design, implement, and assess secure architectures aligned with industry standards. Through lectures, labs, and case studies, students gain experience in IAM, data protection, network segmentation, and secure DevOps. Advanced topics include Kubernetes and container security, infrastructure as code, AI-driven threat detection, and ethical cloud penetration testing. Students analyze real-world incidents, build automated security workflows, and apply frameworks such as NIST, SOC 2, GDPR, and FedRAMP. A team project challenges students to architect and present a secure cloud solution with risk assessment.

This course offers valuable perspective for both the non-technical business manager and the technical cybersecurity or IT manager. It is the vital connector between the technical world of threats, vulnerabilities, and exploits, and the business world of board-level objectives, enterprise risk management, and organizational leadership. Now more than ever, managers have a need and responsibility to understand cyber risk. Just as financial risks and other operational risks have to be effectively managed within an organization, cyber risk has to be managed. It spans far beyond information technology, with broad implications in the areas of organizational behavior, financial risk modeling, legal issues, and executive leadership.

This course will focus on understanding key areas within security operations from a management perspective. Upon completion of this course, students will understand implementation and maintenance best practices for security operations services such as incident response, internal investigations, security analysis, threat intelligence and digital forensics. Students will not only get hands-on experience within each discipline but will also understand how to recruit and train others within a security operations center or security team.

Web applications play a vital role in every modern organization. If an organization does not properly test its web applications to identify security flaws, adversaries may be able to compromise these applications damaging functionality and accessing sensitive data. The focus of this course is on developing practical web application security testing skills required to assess a web application's security posture and convincingly demonstrate the business impact of discovered vulnerabilities, if exploited. The course includes both lectures and a variety of demonstrations and hands-on exercises in finding web application security vulnerabilities. During the course, students learn about assessment tools and methodologies.

This capstone course will cement skills and knowledge learned throughout the Master of Information and Cybersecurity program: core cybersecurity technical skills, understanding of the societal factors that impact the cybersecurity domain and how cybersecurity issues impact humans, and professional skills such as problem-solving, communication, influencing, collaboration, and group management – to prepare students for success in the field. The centerpiece is a semester-long group project in which teams of students propose and select a complex cybersecurity issue and apply multi-faceted analysis and problem-solving to identify, assess, and manage risk and deliver impact.