Hello. And welcome to detection in mitigation of threats and attacks in computer security. My name is Gregg Williams. I'm a lecturer for the computer science department at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. I am also the director of networks and infrastructure for the Office of Information Technology, for the university. We recently just did a Reorgs so I'm also now the director of operations. So which means, my teams handle all physical I.T. stuff. So servers, telecommunications, power, all of that. So, what makes me qualified for this course? Well, I'm the former information security officer for the university and also the former HIPAA, which is the medical side. The security officer for that, for the university. I have also been practicing security for many, many years and now my title, my job that I have been doing for the past several years, after I moved on from security allows me to innovate much, much, allows me to innovate computer security into all of our systems and not just from a security office perspective. So the university has about 12,000 students, so it's a medium sized university.We have a lot of systems that need security and we also have a lot of things that need securing in-general, like people for example. I also hold certifications in Windows forensics and penetration testing. In addition, I've also let this lapse because I'm no longer practicing it but I have been certified previously in the payment card industry internal security auditor, as an ISA, which allows me to audit credit card industry environments. The university as a whole, is a type 2 merchant or a Level 2 merchant which means that we process millions and millions of dollars in credit card transactions a year. It's a very rigorous certification to have. But, I wanted to start innovating again so that's why I got rid of computer security. But you know what, once you go into computer security, you never get out of it. So I still teach it. I still practice it on a day to day basis and still meet with my security office and my security information security officer on a daily basis. What do we need to be concerned with? I still manage the credit card system network. So all these tools, all this hardware; all have to have computer security built in. Who is the course for? This course is for anyone that is interested in computer security from a practical perspective. You may be an executive or in senior management or want to learn more about how to protect your organization or be able to understand what your information security officer is telling you. You may be a small business owner that needs to weed through all the information that you're getting from vendors, or you need to be concerned with, how do I detect when I'm getting attacked? How do we protect information from a practical perspective? This course approaches the practical side of computer security. It is the third course in the specialization called Practical Computer Security. Parts of this course are going to help you prepare for industry leading computer security certifications, like security+ and the CISSP among others. My approach in this course and the others in the specialization, is to help you prepare for what you're going to see in your career.This course is designed for anyone looking to learn more about computer security from somebody that practices it on a day to day basis, not just teaches it in a classroom setting. The modules in this course are as follows; Module one is going to introduce you to firewalls, module 2 is going to examine intrusion, detection and prevention, module 3 is going to prepare you for explore the tools for detection and mitigation and module 4 is going to dive into real world scenarios. The thing that I've seen from being attacked, is how do I detect things from when i was attacked and how to mitigate those as well. At the end of each module, there will be a quiz covering the topic that we discussed in that module. There's also going to be a course project at the end, which is also in module 5. It is going to be the hands-on application of what you have learned. You must achieve at least an 80% passing grade on the graded material, which is the course quizzes, the module quizzes and the project in order to pass the course. Even though there's no technical component to this course, I will show you how to set up your own lab should you want to get more involved with this course. I hope that you get excited about the course. I hope that you'll learn from the stories, from the real world scenarios that I've been involved in. And since I've been senior management for a good majority of my career, I hope that you understand that what you may learn here is going to help you in your career by either explaining something to senior management or if you are senior management to be able to understand what your employees are telling you, or what your information security officer is telling you. Understanding how to weed through what vendors are telling you should be focused on, is important as well. So let me just share a brief story with you. It's a story about the university and a denial of service attack. So because this course is talking about detection and mitigation, we had a Denial-of-Service attack happen in 2010. It took down the university's internet connection for two days. Now, how did we solve it? Well, it was through detection and looking at patterns and then looking at how we mitigated those attacks that really helped us through the entire process. Yes we lost internet for two days because of this attack. However, I'm going to share some stories just like that and expand upon them in detail throughout this course. See you in lesson one.
