ICS0018 Course Guide

Aims of the Course

The course is primarily meant to the students of Cyber Security Engineering Bachelor's programme at Tallinn University of Technology to cover the more human-oriented aspects of cybersecurity. It is also offered to the students of partner universities under the aegis of EuroTEQ. In the 2023 Spring term it is on its maiden flight (it has been run once earlier, within the programme of the earlier independent IT College).

The main goal is to introduce social engineering (in the cybersecurity sense - the term has different meanings in other disciplines) or non-technical attacks targeting PIBKAC, or the "problem between the keyboard and the chair". The course uses the books by Christopher Hadnagy as its foundation, complementing them with writings of several other authors as well as the lecturers' own notes and experiences. As a mixture of technology, training/education, policy-making and some applied psychology (the list of main topics can be found at the front page, the course is relatively non-technical and can be handled without specific IT background (various experiences from the online world do help though).

According to the official learning outcomes of the course, the students will - know the essence of social engineering and its main forms and techniques; - recognize main social engineering attacks and react appropriately; - know main measures of prevention and mitigation (in technology, training and policy).

Tools/environments

In the Spring 2023 term, we will run the course in the e-learning mode (due to a significant number of distance participants from EuroTEQ). This time, we will use the IT College wiki (where you are now) for documentation, and the University's MS Teams for contact sessions (lectures/discussions and seminars). At the beginning of the course, all participants should be added to the Social Engineering group at Teams. Note: future runs of the course may switch to something else, Jitsi Meet being a likely candidate.

There are some recommendations to help keep the online communication smooth - please see the university regulations page (section "Online learning good practice") as well as some of our own points here. The contact sessions will run according to the official schedule (see the timetable below).

How do we work

Lectures/discussions

The course experiments with blending traditional lectures with text chat discussions. Each lecture will consist of 3-4 mini-lectures (15-20 minutes each; mostly on a single umbrella topic) alternating with 5-10 minute discussion breaks in the MS Teams text chat. We will use the latter rather that voice chat - it will accommodate more people within the limited time frame (Note: we might switch to voice chat if the actual number of partipants will be remarkably lower than initially registered - it remains to be seen). The text chat will be open throughout the lecture (everyone can write add comments and questions), but the lecturer will only be able to respond during the discussion breaks.

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