ISYS 376. Cyber Security. This class focuses on cyber security as well as corresponding cyber law, policy, and methods and tools for gaining forensic information from computer systems and networks. It includes case studies of cybercrimes as well as information on the capabilities and limitations of forensics techniques used in the analysis of cybercrime. Offered spring semester only. Prerequisite: take one of the following: ISYS 370, CMSC 121 or CMSC 160; or permission of the instructor. 3 credits. (http://www.longwood.edu/assets/academicaffairs/2014-2015_Undergraduate_Catalog_updated.pdf)

My Cyber Security class is taught by Dr. Randy Boyle who has wrote many books about the subject and his research is in password crack. In this class we learn about what the nation is facing in the coming years and what my generation will have to deal with. We learn about how to protect data in an enterprise setting along with how it will be done in the coming years.

Along with learning about what we will have to face we also learn about how cyber security is approached by the government. In that case the government has not taken major steps in securing the private sector's networks. They have for the most part let them fend for themselves against multi-nation hackers. The reason for this is the privacy concern of putting firewalls on the backbone of the US's internet. This will be one of the greatest challenges in the coming years is protecting our infrastructure from foreign nations.

Many of these things we learned about by reading Cyber War by Richard Clarke which gave in depth insight into the way our government deals with the threat of a cyber-attack. Other assignments that taught us how to deal with cyber security was setting up Microsoft security suite on our computers and how to configure them to suite our needs. There are also many other hands on project we had to do to cover all the rising security risk we face.

A project that the class had to do was to use Wireshark to capture internet traffic. However this was only our web traffic because you need a special NIC card to read other people's internet traffic. In this project we had to select our network interface that we wanted to capture packets from. After capturing some packets we had to analyze what we captured. I could click on any type of packet captured and get a summary. Further I could click on those packets and see the data field of each packet. Everyone ran into problem during this project because almost every e-mail service now is encrypted so we were unable to read the contents of those packets.

This was a fun project that allowed the class to see what we may be doing on a daily basis during our careers. I found it to be a great experience using software that was free, and would be using the same version at our jobs, instead of using old software we may never see again. This really helped me when writing up my resume for internships this summer.