Critical Infrastructure Protection and Cybercrime
For people responsible for systems a country cannot do without, the grid, water, fuel, transport, banking, hospitals, communications, and for the investigators and analysts who work the crime and terrorism side of the same problem. Two graduate courses: who attacks this infrastructure and how, and how to protect it.
Overview
The systems a country depends on were not built to be attacked. The grid, water treatment, fuel pipelines, rail, hospitals, payment networks. Most run on control systems designed decades ago for reliability and physical safety, now connected to networks their designers never imagined. The people attacking them range from criminal groups seeking payment to states seeking leverage, and the distinction matters less than it used to.
This certificate works both halves of that problem across two graduate courses.
The first examines conflict in cyberspace through its two principal threats to U.S. national security: cyber terrorism and cyber crime. Who conducts it, what techniques they use, and what an organization can actually do about it, framed as risk management rather than as a catalog of attacks.
The second turns to the infrastructure itself, information security inside the sectors that matter most: banking, securities and commodities markets, industrial supply chain, the electrical and smart grid, energy, transportation, communications, water supply and health. It works through assets, threats, vulnerabilities, impacts and countermeasures, with particular attention to the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems that move electricity, water and fuel, the layer where a network intrusion becomes a physical consequence.
Norwich teaches this as an institution designated by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense, and the certificate is one of the nine published concentrations of the university's Master of Science in Cybersecurity.
What you will learn
By the end of the certificate you will be able to:
- Distinguish cyber crime from cyber terrorism. Who conducts each, what they want, and why the response differs
- Analyze the techniques used against national-security targets, and the countermeasures available against them
- Apply a risk management framework to threats rather than treating each incident as unique
- Assess the security of information systems inside a specific critical infrastructure sector; banking, energy, water, transportation, health, communications, supply chain
- Evaluate SCADA and other industrial control systems, and explain how a network intrusion becomes a physical consequence in the flow of electricity, water or fuel
- Work through assets, threats, vulnerabilities, impacts and countermeasures as a structured analysis of a real environment
- Recommend protective measures in terms a regulator, a board, or an operations team will accept
Program Specific Admission Requirements
A bachelor's degree in any discipline from an accredited institution recognized by the U.S. Department of Education or an equivalent degree from a foreign institution, as evaluated by WES, IERF, or SpanTran.
For your next step visit:Certificate Admissions
For complete details on tuition costs:
Tuition and Fees
