When we set out to build our security concepts courses, our goal was to elevate the knowledge of our students, enabling them to return to work empowered to face security challenges with a deeper understanding of the underlying risk and real threats their organizations face everyday. With that in mind, we believe that it was imperative to include a few key ingredients in these courses that would keep our students engaged and enable them to be more successful in their jobs.
The primary example of this is our emphasis on critical thinking over security check lists. As a result, our students are able to apply the concepts they learn to the infrastructure, applications and incidents they have and will experience in their workplaces. Keeping the content relevant to their work environments is certainly one of our biggest challenges when we develop, maintain and deliver courses. But we love these types of challenges, and it’s one of the reasons we work in this field.
This brings me to the second key ingredient: real world case studies. As we present the course content we also discuss relevant examples of actual incidents and breaches in as much detail as is publicly available and responsible for us to share. Through these case studies, we show our students how security concepts that we are covering in a given course are being leveraged today by actual threat actors and groups.