1Foundations of information security

• 1.1Objectives of information security: the CIA triad and related properties

  Covers the three core properties of information security—confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA)—together with the related properties of authenticity, accountability, non-repudiation, and reliability, plus the OECD Security Guidelines, building the judgment needed to determine which property was compromised in a given incident and which countermeasure should be prioritized.

• 1.2Threats and vulnerabilities

  Covers threats (physical, human, technical) that endanger information assets, the vulnerabilities (bugs, security holes, human vulnerabilities, shadow IT) that make attacks possible, the OWASP Top 10 categorization of common web-application vulnerabilities, and the fraud triangle (opportunity, motive, rationalization) explaining the psychological conditions behind insider fraud.

• 1.3Malware and malicious programs

  Covers the self-replicating worm, remotely controlled bots (botnets, C&C servers, connect-back communication), ransom-demanding ransomware, information-stealing spyware and keyloggers, privilege-concealing rootkits, persistent-access backdoors, disk-resident-free fileless malware, and detection-evading polymorphic/metamorphic malware, building the judgment to diagnose the malware type from observed behavior and choose an appropriate containment measure.

• 1.4Attack techniques (1): authentication and web applications

  Covers password cracking (dictionary attacks, brute force, reverse brute force, rainbow tables, password-list attacks) and the representative web-application attacks XSS (reflected/stored/DOM-based), CSRF, clickjacking, SQL injection, OS command injection, directory traversal, and man-in-the-middle (MITM)/MITB, building the judgment to determine which attack a given vulnerability symptom enables and which countermeasure is effective.

• 1.5Attack techniques (2): network and targeted attacks

  Covers service-disrupting DoS/DDoS attacks (SYN flood, reflection, amplification attacks), targeted attacks/APT aimed at a specific organization and their staged model, the cyber kill chain, the MITRE ATT&CK/CAPEC frameworks that systematize attacker tactics, psychology-exploiting social engineering and business email compromise (BEC), and side-channel attacks that exploit incidental physical information.