Computer Security: Introduction to information and computer security (1/4)

About

Sebastian Lopienski is CERN's Deputy Computer Security Officer. He works on security strategy and policies; offers internal consultancy and audit services; develops and maintains security tools for vulnerability assessment and intrusion detection; provides training and awareness raising; and does incident investigation and response. During his work at CERN since 2001, Sebastian has had various assignments, including designing and developing software to manage and support services hosted in the CERN Computer Centre; providing Central CVS Service for software projects at CERN; and development of applications for accelerator controls in Java. He graduated from the University of Warsaw (MSc in Computer Science) in 2002, and earned an MBA degree at the Enterprise Administration Institute in Aix-en-Provence and Haute Ecole de Gestion in Geneva in 2010. His professional interests include software and network security, distributed systems, and Web and mobile technologies.

With the prevalence of modern information technologies and its increasing integration into our daily live, digital systems become more and more playground for evil people. While in the past, attacks were driven by fame& kudos, nowadays money is the motivating factor. Just the recent months have shown several successful attacks against e.g. Sony, PBS, UNESCO, RSAsecurity, Citibank, and others. Credit card information of hundreds of thousands of people got exposed. Affected companies not only lost their assets and data, also their reputation has suffered. Thus, proper computer security measures are essential. Without question, security must even more become an inherent ingredient when developing, deploying, and operating applications, web sites, and computing services. These lectures shall give an overview of general computer and information security, subsequently focus on the problems of creating secure applications and computer services, highlight the importance of security operations (i.e. prevention,…