Week 1, Lecture 1 — What is Cybersecurity?

Module: COMP09031 — Cybersecurity & Secure Programming

Slot: W1 L1 Content budget: 30 min Embedded interlude: none Anchors: HSE 2021, Colonial Pipeline 2021 Book chapter: 1

Before the lecture

Read Chapter 1 — Week 1, Lecture 1: What is Cybersecurity? in the book PDF (approximately 12 pages, 25 minutes reading time). The chapter opens on the HSE 2021 ransomware attack and the parallel with Colonial Pipeline; the rest of the lecture rests on that anchor.

If this is your first contact with the module, also skim:

  • The Preface (5 pages) — how to use the book and the practicals
  • The course schedule (Home → Schedule)

Slides

Lecture timing

This is the first lecture of the module. The chapter content runs to about 30 minutes; the remaining 20 minutes of the W1 L1 slot are best spent on module welcome, syllabus walkthrough, Moodle / VLE setup, and student Q&A — all of which earn their place at the start of any new module.

Block Time Notes
Module welcome and Moodle setup 0–10 min Get students unblocked on Moodle access first
HSE / Colonial opening 10–20 min The parallel between the two incidents lands more deliberation than the page can give it
CIA triad 20–30 min Tension example: encrypt everything → kills availability
Threat vs vulnerability vs risk 30–35 min Treat risk = threat × vulnerability × impact as a working tool, not as something to memorise
Threat-actor taxonomy 35–40 min Brisk; we return to actors throughout the module
Module logistics, expectations, Q&A 40–50 min Reading list, the W1 Practical, the take-home project shape

Embedded interlude

This lecture has no embedded hands-on interlude — Week 1 is intentionally the lightest week, and module welcome / admin fills the remaining 20 minutes of the slot. The first interlude lands in Week 1, Lecture 2 (live OWASP Top 10 movement page).

If you want an optional 3-minute everyone-on-keyboards moment to break up the lecture, the cleanest one is to have students open the ICO public breach register (https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/data-security-incident-trends/) and find the most recent UK NHS-related entry — it grounds the HSE story in a UK regulatory context. Skip it if running tight.

Common student questions (and short answers)

These come up every cohort — answers ready in case they surface mid-lecture.

  • “Should we have paid the HSE ransom?” — There is no clean answer; the discomfort is the point. Use it as a discussion prompt, not a debate to resolve. The Department of Health PIR notes that paying would have set a precedent; not paying cost over €100m. Both costs are real.
  • “Why didn’t they have backups?” — They did, but the backups were reachable from the production network and were also encrypted by Conti. The PIR is explicit on this. Air-gapped, immutable backups are the lesson.
  • “What ransomware is it now?” — Conti formally disbanded in 2022 after the leaks. The same operators reappeared in BlackCat / ALPHV, Royal, Black Basta, and others. The model — encrypt + exfiltrate + double-extort — is unchanged.
  • “Are we doomed?” — No. The HSE recovered without paying. Colonial recovered most of its ransom. The lesson is that resilience is achievable; the cost of getting it wrong is what motivates the rest of this module.

End-of-lecture self-check

Optional, formative — not graded. A 2-minute self-check on what the lecture covered. Click an option to see immediate feedback.

Going Further

Annotated reading for students who want to go deeper after the lecture.

  • PwC. Conti cyber attack on the HSE: Independent Post Incident Review. Department of Health, Ireland, 3 December 2021. — The single best source on the HSE attack; ~60 pages, written in plain prose, includes the timeline and the technical chain that enabled the breach.
  • Krebs, Brian. Conti Ransomware Group Diaries. KrebsOnSecurity, March 2022. — A four-part series on what the leaked chat logs reveal about how a ransomware-as-a-service operation actually runs. The HR records alone are an education.
  • Bishop, Matt. Computer Security: Art and Science, 2nd ed. (Addison-Wesley, 2018) — The reference textbook for graduate cybersecurity. Chapter 1 covers the triad and its critics; the book overall is the deeper companion to ours.
  • Schneier, Bruce. Secrets and Lies (Wiley, 2000; reissued with new preface 2015) — Where the “process, not product” argument was developed at book length. Twenty-five years on, almost every observation still lands.

← Schedule Next: Week 1, Lecture 2 (coming soon) →