Hello and welcome to the first course in the specialization, Practical Computer Security. This is the first course which is entitled, Introduction to Practical Computer Security. So a little bit about me. My name is Greg Williams, I'm a lecturer for the Computer Science Department at UCCS, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. I am also the Director of IT Operations or information technology operations. Formerly, I'm the Information Security Officer for the university, and also the HIPAA Security Officer for the university which means that I not only dealt with all information security, but I also had to then protect all health information because we are also a medical university as well. One of our small parts of the campus there. My main job as director of operations or if you want to call it networks and infrastructure, essentially, is to manage the teams in technology that run over a 12,000 student university which is really considered a medium-size university. I have certifications in Windows Forensics and penetration testing as well. So, why did I get out of information security? Well, I wanted to innovate. So I was able and you can look at my bio video. But, I really wanted to get back to innovating and you know, once you get into security you really don't get out of it. So it's always in the back of my mind, how do I secure systems and how do my teams secure systems for the entire university and how can I innovate in the infrastructure and the networks that we have? Let's talk about who this course is for. This course is really for anyone that is interested in computer security from a practical perspective, and not necessarily just theory. Because I've been teaching this or practicing this for a while, I understand not only the theory side because I do teach it, however, I have put it into practice over the last, well, throughout my professional career. You may be an executive or senior management and want to learn more about how to protect your organization or be able to understand what the security office is telling you. In my classes I hear all the time of, "I'm stuck in this silo or I don't understand how this works but I don't need to necessarily know the technical details of how everything works." Well, this course is going to be for you. I'm going to go over the broad perspective of how this works in a business sense or what you should really be concerned with. You also may be a small business owner that's concerned about how to keep up with the massive ever changing landscape of security and can't afford to hire someone on your own. I'll dive into some of the concepts that you should be aware of so you may be able to ask the right questions if a vendor is talking to you about security or you want to also talk to your employees about security. This course approaches the practical side of computer security. Again, like I said it's the first course in the specialization of Practical Computer Security. Parts of this course will help you prepare for industry leading computer security certification. Some of the concepts will map directly to Security+ and CISSP, among others. It's not going to prepare you 100 percent. However, much of these concepts are going to be put into a practical perspective so that you understand how to approach these subjects logically. This course is for anyone that is looking to learn more information about computer security from somebody that actually practices it on a day-to-day basis not just teaches it. Of course, you're going to have to understand the theory behind computer security in order to practice it as well. But, my perspectives come from a practical sense, what do we actually put into practice in real world systems? The modules in this course are broken down into four different weeks. The first module is going to introduce you to Practical Computer Security. The second module is going to examine The CIA Triad. The third module will explore Risk and how we manage that risk. And finally, the fourth module is going to dive into the practical application of daily security. Now, there's also a fifth module, but that's more of a project that's going to help you understand all the concepts as a whole and put it into practice. At the end of each module, there's going to be a quiz that is covering the topic that we've discussed. The course project which is in module five is a hands-on application of what you've just learned. You must achieve at least an 80% score passing grade on the assignments in the course 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 and how you can even get more out of this course if you wish to study extra on your own. I hope that you get excited about this course. And since I've been practicing real world information security in an enterprise setting for several years, I hope that I can pass my knowledge on to you. I've also been in senior management for a good majority of my career as well. So I hope that perspective if you are in senior management, you understand that some of the concepts you don't grasp and you need somebody to tell you here is exactly what I mean. I do the same thing. If it's media services, for example, or if it's web services, I don't know the intricacies of all those subjects, but you know what I know real well? I know information security and I know operations. Those are the two things that I can tell you and explain to you exactly what we need to go through. Understanding how to weed through what the vendors tell you what you should be focused on is a hard thing to do, especially if you're receiving many, many calls a day. For example, I get the WannaCry attack which was brought on by the NSA hole the exploit that they had, this was several months ago, I guess a month ago. But, vendors are calling me nonstop and say, "Hey, how do you protect yourself from WannaCry? We have the magic bullet." Well, I already know how. I've been practicing it. So, if you are bombarded with vendors talking to you then, this course is also for you. So, I'll see you in lesson one.
