Lesson 1.1: What is cybersecurity? Confidentiality, integrity, availability
What information security and cybersecurity protect, the three goals every security decision comes back to (confidentiality, integrity and availability, the CIA triad), and what a breach of each looks like. In the lab you find and fix one problem of each kind on a company machine: a salary file anyone can read, a web page someone changed, and a service that stopped.
17 min
You will learn to
- Explain information security and cybersecurity
- Define confidentiality, integrity and availability with an example each
- Recognise which goal a given incident breaks
- Check a file's integrity with a hash fingerprint
Key terms
- Information security
- Protecting information, on paper or in computers, from being seen, changed or made unusable by the wrong people or by accident.
- Cybersecurity
- The part of information security that deals with computers, networks and the data and services on them.
- Confidentiality
- Only authorised people can see the information.
- Integrity
- The information is accurate and complete, and has not been changed without authorisation.
- Availability
- The information and services are there and usable when authorised people need them.
- CIA triad
- The three goals together: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability. Most security problems break at least one of them.
- Hash (fingerprint)
- A short fixed-length value computed from data. The same data always gives the same hash; any change gives a completely different one.
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