TBD
8 weeks, online
15–20 hours per week
Special pricing up to 20% discount is available if you enroll with your colleagues. Please send an email to group-enrollments@emeritus.org for more information.
Cyberattacks are on the rise globally and will only increase in frequency, complexity, and cost as technology proliferates. At the same time, a recent report by CyberEdge found that approximately 87% of organizations don’t have the skilled cybersecurity personnel needed to address these growing threats.
With MIT xPRO's Certificate in Cybersecurity Defense, you can begin or continue your career journey in cybersecurity and help fill this critical gap in expertise. As a participant in this 8-week course, you’ll get a comprehensive introduction to defensive cybersecurity that’s focused on core concepts such as cryptography, security operations center (SOC), incident response (IR), secure system and network administration, and cloud security. You’ll learn the fundamentals of secure communication between computer systems and organizations and how to identify and respond to cyberattacks. And you’ll be broadening your career opportunities in this rapidly expanding field as you work toward entry-level positions such as SOC analyst.
Don't miss your chance to enhance your existing IT expertise or accelerate your career with in-demand cybersecurity skills.
Average annual salary for an SOC analyst
The average cost of a single data breach
The percentage of organizations boosting their cybersecurity budgets in 2021 due to increased threats
Build a foundation
Expand your knowledge
Apply your learning
A certificate from MIT xPRO that recognizes your skills and success
Learn about the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), and Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) frameworks as well as the MITRE ATT&CK® knowledge base
Market-ready cybersecurity skills in a high-growth market
Case studies on the connections between IR and criminal digital forensics and disaster recovery
Insights and case studies from renowned MIT faculty
Assignments and a final project to demonstrate an understanding of defensive cybersecurity
Gain an understanding of the repercussions of inadequate defensive security strategies. Learn how the NIST model applies to defensive strategy and get a detailed overview of the layers of defense as well as an introduction to cryptography and how it relates to security services.
Get a high-level overview of cryptography concepts, including an introduction to hash functions, message authentication codes (MAC), symmetric key encryption, the relationship between public and shared key encryption, and more.
Examine SOC models and their purposes, functions, and services. Understand the differences between reactive and proactive threat detection and research a variety of SOC tools and describe their functions, strengths/weaknesses, and administration.
Identify the key components and sequences of IR and describe the connections between IR and criminal digital forensics and disaster recovery. Explore the real-life challenges organizations face with IR plans and teams to help you be better prepared for a potential IR position.
Understand the role and responsibilities of systems administrators and how they are able to protect against security issues and confirm that their protection measures are successful.
Dive deeper into the topic of secure network administration, from learning the fundamentals to exploring different types of network filtering.
Analyze fundamental cloud security concepts and principles and explore the pros and cons of cloud-based services and other cloud service models. Get an introduction to the components of the CSA Cloud Controls Matrix.
Consider the job responsibilities of an SOC analyst's role. Learn how VPNs connect the concepts of cryptography and network authentication services and explore security issues that can arise within an organization. You’ll also have an opportunity to use soft and presentation skills through various learning activities during this final week.
Gain an understanding of the repercussions of inadequate defensive security strategies. Learn how the NIST model applies to defensive strategy and get a detailed overview of the layers of defense as well as an introduction to cryptography and how it relates to security services.
Understand the role and responsibilities of systems administrators and how they are able to protect against security issues and confirm that their protection measures are successful.
Get a high-level overview of cryptography concepts, including an introduction to hash functions, message authentication codes (MAC), symmetric key encryption, the relationship between public and shared key encryption, and more.
Dive deeper into the topic of secure network administration, from learning the fundamentals to exploring different types of network filtering.
Examine SOC models and their purposes, functions, and services. Understand the differences between reactive and proactive threat detection and research a variety of SOC tools and describe their functions, strengths/weaknesses, and administration.
Analyze fundamental cloud security concepts and principles and explore the pros and cons of cloud-based services and other cloud service models. Get an introduction to the components of the CSA Cloud Controls Matrix.
Identify the key components and sequences of IR and describe the connections between IR and criminal digital forensics and disaster recovery. Explore the real-life challenges organizations face with IR plans and teams to help you be better prepared for a potential IR position.
Consider the job responsibilities of an SOC analyst's role. Learn how VPNs connect the concepts of cryptography and network authentication services and explore security issues that can arise within an organization. You’ll also have an opportunity to use soft and presentation skills through various learning activities during this final week.
Keri Pearlson
Nickolai Zeldovich
Barbara Johnson
Rajiv Shridhar
Una-May O'Reilly
Keri Pearlson
Executive director of cybersecurity at MIT Sloan (CAMS), formerly the Interdisciplinary Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity at the MIT Sloan School of Management
Dr. Keri Pearlson is the executive director of cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, formerly the Interdisciplinary Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (IC) 3. She has worked in academia and industry, including positions at Babson College, The University of Texas at Austin, Gartner's Research Board, CSC, and AT&T. She founded KP Partners, a CIO advisory services firm, as well as the IT Leaders' Forum, a community of next-generation IT executives. She is the founding director of the Analytics Leadership Consortium at the International Institute of Analytics. She began her career at Hughes Aircraft Company as a systems analyst.
Dr. Pearlson's research spans MIS, business strategy, and organizational design. Her current research studies how organizations build a culture of cybersecurity and build trust to share mitigations for cyber breaches. Dr. Pearlson holds a doctorate in business administration in MIS from Harvard Business School along with an MS in industrial engineering and a BS in mathematics from Stanford University. She is the founding president of the Austin Society for Information Management and was named "2014 National SIM Leader of the Year."
Nickolai Zeldovich
Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT
Prof. Zeldovich is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2008. His research interests are in building practical secure systems. Recent projects by Prof. Zeldovich and his students and colleagues include the CryptDB encrypted database, the STACK tool for finding undefined behavior bugs in C programs, the FSCQ formally verified file system, the Algorand cryptocurrency, and the Vuvuzela private messaging system.
Prof. Zeldovich has been involved with several start-up organizations, including Moka5 (desktop virtualization), PreVeil (end-to-end encryption), and Algorand (cryptocurrency). Prof. Zeldovich's work has been recognized with "best paper" awards at the ACM SOSP Conference, a Sloan Fellowship (2010), an NSF CAREER Award (2011), the MIT EECS Spira Teaching Award (2013), the MIT Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award (2014), the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award (2017), and an MIT EECS Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship (2018).
Barbara Johnson
Senior Security Consultant; Security Certification Educator; Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management; Education: BSISE, MBA; (ISC)2 Certifications: CISSP and ISSMP; ISACA Certifications: CISA, CISM, CRISC, CDPSE, Business Continuity; Certifications: CBCP and MBCI
Securing information systems is Barbara's purpose, and educating security professionals is her passion. Barbara Johnson is a senior security, audit and compliance management consultant with over 20 years of experience. She designs and manages information security programs for the government as well as the automotive, entertainment, financial, and travel sectors. Her security, privacy, risk, and audit frameworks include ISO 27001, ISACA COBIT, NIST, HIPAA, and PCI. She brings global best practices into her clients' enterprise security governance, policies and standards, architecture, and operations, inclusive of cryptography, incident response, and business continuity and disaster recovery. However, she tailors a security strategy to a client's industry and risk appetite.
Barbara enhances educational delivery as a security, audit, and compliance practitioner. She is a lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and a courseware developer for the MIT xPRO Cyber Program. For (ISC)2, CISSP and ISSMP, she develops courseware, teaches as a senior and lead instructor, speaks at Security Congress, and was chair of (ISC)2 Common Body of Knowledge. Furthermore, she imparts ISACA global best practices through its CISA, CISM, and CRISC certification classes. As a security educator, she has readied thousands of security professionals for certification exams.
Rajiv Shridhar
Information Security Officer and Director of Research Computing, MIT Sloan School of Management
Rajiv Shridhar is the Information Security Officer and Director of Research Computing at MIT Sloan School of Management. He leads the team that enables the research of MIT Sloan faculty, students and collaborators by providing specialized computing infrastructure, data sets, software tools, support and technology consulting. As Information Security Officer, he is responsible for the development and oversight of risk and security frameworks in alignment with the information security needs of MIT Sloan.
Rajiv is a senior lecturer at Northeastern University, where he teaches graduate level courses in computer engineering, cyber physical systems and telecommunication networks. In his teaching he seeks to maximize student learning outcomes by reinforcing and extending in-class learning with experiential education via extensive hands-on projects, labs and assignments. Rajiv received an MS in Computer Systems Engineering from Northeastern University.
Una-May O'Reilly
Principal Research Scientist and Leader of ALFA Group at MIT-SAIL
Dr. O'Reilly's research group, AnyScale Learning for All, develops new, data-driven analyses of online coding courses, deep learning techniques for program representations, adversarial attacks on machine learning models, model training for adversarial robustness, and cyber hunting tools and cyber arms race models.
One of the main areas Dr. O'Reilly is investigating is cybersecurity and how to stop destructive and escalating arms races. She hopes to understand the nature of adversarial intelligence by computationally replicating it—that is, by developing "artificial adversarial intelligence." This will help reveal the dynamics of conflicting behavior and how adaptation drives it, so that we can put a stop to these types of arms races. Dr. O'Reilly holds a Ph.D. from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
Daniel Gorecki
Erica Wilson
Ion Santotomas
Get recognized! Upon successful completion of this program, MIT xPRO grants a certificate of completion to participants. This program is graded as a pass or fail; participants must receive 75% to pass and obtain the certificate of completion.
Download BrochureAfter successful completion of the program, your verified digital certificate will be emailed to you, at no additional cost, in the name you used when registering for the program. All certificate images are for illustrative purposes only and may be subject to change at the discretion of MIT.
