Gain insights into cyber security fundamentals, explore common threats, discover protection mechanisms like firewalls, learn monitoring and response strategies, and develop secure systems as a developer.

Modern computer systems are almost universally connected, which creates wider attack surfaces well beyond code to users, hardware, and more. Securing systems is thus a fundamental skill for modern software engineers.

This course is a comprehensive introduction to cyber security best practices. You’ll start with an overview of common threats and vulnerabilities, as well as high-level concepts like privilege, integrity, logging, and mediation. With these concepts in mind, you’ll then learn common protection mechanisms and defense strategies from endpoint protection to firewalls, gateways, and proxy servers. Next, you’ll learn monitoring and detection techniques, alerts, and event management. Finally, when you detect a threat, you’ll know how to respond with support tickets, data preservation, and change management.

By the end of this course, you’ll have a better understanding of modern cyber security practices and a clear roadmap to implementing these as a developer.

Cyber Security Best Practices for Developers

# Overview

Email is one of the most effective ways to deliver malware. Once installed, it’s possible for an attacker to obtain a foothold on the network and pivot to other endpoints, eventually finding their way to protected resources like databases, file shares, and sensitive emails.


> **Note:** There are several notable viruses in history that used email as a medium to cause cyber damage on a massive scale.
>
> Mydoom, for example, is a virus that was released in 2004. It scraped addresses from infected machines and sent copies of itself to those addresses. It also trapped those infected machines into a web of computers called a botnet that performed distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks were intended to shut down a target website or server. It was responsible for 25% of all emails sent.

>
> Another example is the Klez worm that was released in 2001. It sent fake emails, spoofed recognized senders, and attempted to deactivate other viruses. It was responsible for infecting 7.2% of all computers.


# How it works


An email gateway has the following properties: 

- It can be implemented in-line so that all emails have to be analyzed and marked as safe before being delivered to employee inboxes.


- It may also be able to analyze attached files, similar to how an MPS runs binaries in a dedicated container. 

- Some versions of a gateway can also analyze and sanitize any links in the email body.

Learn how an email gateway protects an organization from malicious emails.

Introduction

Basics of Security

Detect

Protect

Respond

Conclusion

Email Gateway

Overview