My graduate school experience at East Carolina University - ICTN6823 Information Security Management

ICTN 6823 - Information Security Management.


Finally, by the time I started this course, I was finished with my core courses and ready to start into my concentration. (Note: Click http://www.tecs.ecu.edu/departments/technology_systems/graduate_programs/MS_technology_systems/information_security.html

to go to the course catalog.)



ICTN 6823 was the first course in my concentration. I took this course in the Summer of 2007 and had the great Dr. Phil Lunsford as my professor (http://www.tecs.ecu.edu/departments/technology_systems/faculty_and_staff/lunsford.html)



We used the textbook Management of Information Security by Whitman & Mattord http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Cases-Management-Information-Security/dp/0619216271/ref=pd_rhf_shvl_1

This class was a combination of book reading, assignments and a final paper submitted to a place for publishing.

A lot of the assignments involved using cryptography to hide files within another file. We used a tool called TrueCrypt. Since my class, TrueCrypt has released a major version - 6.0 - that's supposed to be a lot better. I need to check that out.

The book's topics were very high level on information security. It talks of planning at the CIO level and the security software development life cycle. We looked at risk analysis and contingency planning from a CIO level point of view. One of the important topics that seem to follow me through the course was of the organization's security policy.

Our class "met" in text chat along with the professor. Dr. Lunsford never really required us to show for class but we could attend in case we had questions. Dr. Lunsford usually let us lead the class discussion but if it got slow, he would throw some security topics out there for us.

We had to write a term paper for the class and submit it for publication. My paper was on the topic of Blueprint for Web Application Security. This paper was destined to be a how to guide on guiding a software development team on considering secure ways of programming to shore up defenses. In addition, creating a security awareness training program for developers was an idea on getting developers thinking about what things can creep into a web application and how to stop them. This was a high level paper and I will have to admit, not a very good paper. I guess the more that I know now, I can look back at this paper and spot the inconsistencies.

Needless to say, my paper didn't get published!

My graduate school experience so far....(Overview) - First course - A Program Introduction

Currently, I am enrolled in graduate studies at East Carolina University in Greenville for a Master in Information Security. Part of graduate requirements dictate that each student must take and pass a comprehensive exam in order to receive a degree. Part of preparing for this, I'm going back through all of my previous classes and reviewing the information. I thought "This would be a great blog posting" Maybe future students or someone who is thinking of taking this same program would benefit from this information.

So, here is the first part in a series of blog postings "What to expect in Masters of Information Security program at East Carolina University.".

First of all here is a link to the program: http://www.tecs.ecu.edu/departments/technology_systems/graduate_programs/MS_technology_systems/information_security.html

You will see that the program requires 30 hours of classroom instruction broken up into 10 different courses. The first four courses are what is considered "core courses", then a student launches into a "concentration." Since my concentration is Information Security, I go ahead and take those courses. My program coordinator is Kelly Bass and she is terrific! Very helpful.

Looking at the link above, the first of the four core courses is ITEC 6050 - Program Introduction.

ITEC6050 - Program Introduction. Fall 2005.

My professor for my first course was Dr. Charles Coddington: http://www.tecs.ecu.edu/departments/technology_systems/faculty_and_staff/coddington.html

I really like Dr. Coddington personally as he was very fair and organized professor. The first course to me was very easy. It was a program introduction so we went over some of the following:

1) How to use the Internet to do research including using the online library at ECU and how to sign up to IEEE Explore database using your ECU credentials. This has been very useful throughout the rest of my academic career at ECU.
2) Listserv - What are they, where are they and how to sign up and use listservs.
3) Yahoo Groups - How to sign up and use to the full extent Yahoo groups for online collaboration.
4) mIRC - We used mIRC chat to hold weekly class sessions. Dr. Coddington set up a mIRC chat server on one of ECU's servers that we used to interact in class.
5) Group project - our class divided up into groups and were assigned a team project. Our team learned how to use a wiki and built a collaborative wiki that simulated a fictitious medical office. The cool thing about this was that I then brought this knowledge back to my company. We had a series of loosely connected homegrown HTML pages for our project data. I was able to download
the wiki software and build a wiki for our team to use. It was a major hit!
6) Secure FTP - We studied and learned how much safer secure FTP was from a regular FTP server.
7) Midterm and final exams - not too difficult as this was mostly research using the Internet.
8) Required textbook? - no required textbook for this course.

Next - stay tuned for a review of core course: ITEC 6000- Statistics for Business Managers.