Gavin Lombardi

The foundations of network security: objectives, architecture, models and layers, plus risk management, security policy and the five keys of security (confidentiality, integrity, availability, accountability, auditability).

• CIA triad, AAA and non-repudiation
• Threats: password cracking, DoS, spoofing, social engineering, zero-days
• Risk management and security policy vs. standards vs. procedures
• Security, disaster recovery and incident response plans
• Firewalls, IDS/IPS, VPNs and biometrics
• Cryptography and PKI fundamentals
• Privacy and compliance: HIPAA, FERPA, PCI DSS

Attack and defense methods for networks, studied from the hacker's point of view: attacks, intrusion detection, malicious code, computer crime and industrial espionage.

• Hacker methodology: reconnaissance, scanning, gaining and maintaining access, covering tracks
• Network scanning and enumeration (e.g. Nmap)
• Viruses, worms and other malicious code
• Intrusion detection systems
• Computer crime and incident response
• Industrial espionage and ICS/SCADA security
• Ethical hacking practices

Civil and common law as it applies to network security: statutes, jurisdiction and constitutional issues in computer crime and privacy, plus how digital evidence is seized, handled and presented in court.

• Federal statutes: CFAA, HIPAA, FERPA, COPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI DSS
• Rules of evidence and admissibility
• Search warrants, evidence seizure and chain of custody
• Court presentation and expert witnesses
• Privacy, free speech and BYOD policy

An in-depth look at communication protocols, centered on TCP/IP, examined from an attacker's perspective to expose protocol weaknesses, along with the authentication and encryption used to defend them.

• TCP/IP architecture, routing, addressing, fragmentation and protocol analysis
• Kerberos, multifactor and biometric authentication
• Symmetric and asymmetric ciphers: AES, RSA, Diffie-Hellman
• Hashing (MD5, SHA), digital signatures and PKI
• IPsec, SSL/TLS and VPNs
• Wireless security: WEP, WPA, WPA2
• NAT, TCP Wrappers and security policy

Firewall, web and e-commerce security: firewall concepts, types and topologies, how they relate to TCP/IP, web server security, and digital certificates.

• Firewall types: packet filtering, stateful inspection, application and circuit-level gateways
• Firewall architectures, rules and NAT
• Host-based vs. network-based intrusion detection
• Incident response and forensic analysis, including chain of custody
• Packet analysis with Wireshark
• Web server, HTTP and e-commerce security; certificates and PKI

Networking media, physical and logical topologies, standards and protocols, with an emphasis on TCP/IP and IP addressing, and on implementing and supporting LANs and WANs.

• OSI and TCP/IP models
• IPv4 addressing, subnetting and CIDR
• Routing and switching
• Configuring routers, switches and a small-office network
• Wireless standards and security
• LAN/WAN technologies and topologies
• Network troubleshooting tools and basic firewall setup

Principles and practices of software development: problem solving and programming logic in structured and object-oriented design, independent of any one language.

• Software development life cycle (SDLC)
• Pseudocode and flowcharting
• Sequence, selection and loop structures
• Arrays and modular functions
• Object-oriented design: classes, attributes, methods, encapsulation
• UML class diagrams
• Team-based design

Designing, building and managing websites by hand-coding HTML and CSS.

• Hand-coded HTML and CSS
• Links, images and image maps
• Tables and page layout
• HTML forms and server-side processing
• Responsive design for multiple devices
• Audio and video elements
• Publishing, accessibility and copyright basics

An introduction to relational database theory, and to administering and querying databases with commercial database systems.

• Relational database theory and design
• Tables, keys and relationships
• Writing SQL queries
• Database administration
• Working with multiple database products

The fundamentals of object-oriented programming in Java, with an emphasis on building, debugging and documenting console and GUI applications.

• Data types, operators and Boolean logic
• Selection: if/else and switch
• Loops, including sentinel and input-validation loops
• Methods and parameter passing
• Arrays and parallel arrays
• String and Scanner classes; text file input/output
• GUI dialogs with JOptionPane

Skills for succeeding in college: study strategies, time management and academic planning.

• Study and time-management strategies
• Academic and career planning

Applied math for technical careers: arithmetic, unit conversion, algebra, geometry and trigonometry.

• Scientific notation, significant digits and metric/standard conversion
• Ratios, proportions and linear equations
• Perimeter, area, surface area and volume
• Pythagorean theorem and right-triangle trigonometry

Digital and information literacy, core computer concepts (hardware, software, operating systems, cloud, databases, security) and hands-on work with productivity applications.

• Spreadsheets with formulas and logic functions
• Word processing and presentations
• Evaluating sources and citing them correctly
• Cybersecurity attacks and defenses
• Operating systems and basic HTML/CSS
• Cloud computing, IoT, blockchain and AI overview

Technical communication: organizing and writing clear reports, business correspondence and research-based writing, plus oral presentation practice.

• Organizing technical information
• Technical reports and documentation
• Business correspondence
• Research and citation
• Oral presentations