What Cybersecurity Protects
The three goals of information security, the things worth protecting, and why every employee has a part to play.
8 min
Activities: 0 of 2
Information is an asset
Every organisation depends on information: customer records, prices, designs, payroll, emails, contracts. It also depends on the systems that hold and move that information: laptops, phones, servers, cloud services and networks. Cybersecurity is the work of protecting this information and these systems from harm, whether the harm is caused on purpose or by accident.
In this course you will learn how attackers work, how to protect your accounts, data and devices, what to do when something goes wrong, and how to apply all of it in real situations.
The three goals of information security
Two short examples
A dental clinic. A receptionist leaves the patient booking screen open while she goes to lunch. A visitor photographs it. Patients' names, phone numbers and treatment notes are now outside the clinic's control. This is a confidentiality failure, and it needed no technical skill at all.
A building contractor. An attacker gets into the email account of a site manager and sends the finance team new bank details for a regular supplier. The next payment goes to the attacker. This is an integrity failure: information was changed and trusted.
Match each failure to the security goal it breaks
- A salary file is emailed to the wrong person
- Bank details on an invoice are changed by a criminal
- Ransomware stops all computers working
A patient record screen is left open and a visitor photographs it. Which goal has failed?