Harvard’s Free Computer Science Courses in 2024

6. Cybersecurity: CS50’s Introduction to Computer Science

In today’s world, it is essential to have a good knowledge of cybersecurity as cyber threats are becoming more common. Harvard’s CS50 course offers a dedicated segment on cybersecurity as part of its “Introduction to Computer Science” course.

The course covers various topics such as encryption, secure coding practices, and ethical hacking, providing a comprehensive understanding of cybersecurity principles and practices.

What You’ll Learn

This course is CS50’s introduction to cybersecurity, created for both technical and non-technical audiences. You will learn how to protect your data, devices, and systems from the latest threats and how to identify and assess future ones.

You’ll gain an understanding that cybersecurity isn’t just a matter of absolutes, but rather a function of risks and rewards for attackers and costs and benefits for yourself.

You’ll also learn that cybersecurity is a trade-off with usability, and the course will provide you with high-level and low-level examples of threats to help you fully understand the topic. Finally, you’ll complete assignments based on real-world events. Course link

By the end of the course, participants will learn:

• hacking, cracking
• social engineering, phishing attacks
• passcodes, passwords, SSO
• brute-force attacks, dictionary attacks
• biometrics
• multi-factor authentication, password managers
• ethical hacking
• (distributed) denial-of-service attacks
• viruses, worms, botnets
• SQL injection attacks
• port-scanning
• proxies, firewalls
• automatic updates
• closed-source, open-source software
• buffer-overflow attacks
• secure deletion
• hashing, salting
• secret-key, public-key encryption, digital signatures
• full-disk encryption, ransomware
• cookies, sessions, incognito mode
• anonymization, de-identification
• verification
• operating systems, app stores