A free, self-paced course about Cybersecurity 101 is on offer by Microsoft's Cloud Security Advocates. It's a 30+ lesson curriculum targeted at complete novices.

Over the last couple of years, but especially during 2023, Microsoft expanded its educational facilities. For instance, it has released a number of self-paced projects we at I Programmer have covered, such as:

• Microsoft's Generative AI for Beginners
• Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence for Beginners
• Web Development for Beginners
• JavaScript and Node.js for Beginners
• Java For Beginners
• Data Science for Beginners
• Machine Learning for Beginners
• SQL Workshops

This one is about Cybersecurity and the good news is that it is vendor-agnostic and not Microsoft-tooling-focused. At a high level it covers:

• Basic cyber security concepts such as the CIA triad, the differences between risks, threats, etc.
• What security controls are and what forms they take.
• What zero trust is and why this is important in modern cyber security.
• The key concepts and themes across identity, networking, security operations, infrastructure and data security.
• Examples of tools used to implement security controls.

Saying that, it's not about penetration testing but it's about employing the best industry practices in order to secure your infrastructure. That means going through the fundamentals of:

• Basic security
• Identity & access management
• Network security
• SecOps key concepts
• Infrastructure security
• Data security

However securing your perimeter means nothing if you have vulnerable applications running on your servers. As such the course also goes also through the fundamental security concepts of making software Applications. These include AppSec concepts like "secure by design" and input validation as well as tooling like pipeline security tools, code scanning, secret scanning, etc.

As a final touch, being in sync with the times, it also includes modules on AI security. Among those we also get to discover what responsible AI is and the AI specific harms that security professionals need to be aware of.

The course is divided into small lessons that should take around 30-60 mins to complete each. At the end of each module there's a quiz to take to check if you comprehended the material well.
The material itself is a blend of video tutorials and text with links to further resources.

To sum it up, this is really an all encompassing course; commencing with the basics and finishing with AI security and everything in between. Hence if you're looking to get a holistic overview of what makes Cybersecurity, this one is for you, hands down. 

More Information

Cybersecurity for Beginners

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