"Intermediate PC Security" Course Summary

What is PC security in a nutshell?

PC security applies protection layers to an endpoint computer's underlying components within a corporate environment to protect and defend one of the largest attack surfaces in a company.

PC security takes considerations from components that essentially do their processing. The basic input and output system (BIOS), which has threats that are often overlooked, and the firmware of devices that interact with computers such as USB, hard drives, and peripheral devices, are fairly significant in terms of volume.

It also considers other components that directly interact with PC environments, such as network connectivity that occurs when a printer or an email is sent, drivers that are often installed when plugging a device, or software upgrades that may compromise corporate endpoints and availability.

Why is it essential to protect the PC?

Personal computers and other endpoint devices make up more than half of the overall corporate network and infrastructure. Therefore, they add up to one of the largest attack vectors. With the particular current crisis due to SARS-CoV-2, more well-known as COVID-19, most businesses are transitioning into digital modalities such as video conference, remote access software, cloud, etc. This also means that an increasing number of employees and users are working from home environments, but also brings other considerations to the table. These include malicious software growing everyday and corporate surfaces and perimeters becoming more and more blurry.

Best practices across the world include protecting several different layers to enhance security, but still, PC security is often neglected and mostly has just been provided by antivirus solutions. More information on different security best practices can be found in Cybrary's catalog.

How to provide PC Security?

Understanding the basics of computing and the reasoning behind it will greatly help the way security is applied, not only to PCs but across the network. Most interactions like connecting devices, interacting with media, surfing through websites, and so on start when a user sits in front of a PC and starts interacting with it.

Understanding and accounting for people working with computers, from regular users, managing software, and providing maintenance, can be presented in the form of visitors, contractors, employees, and partners in a major way. Knowing the importance of PC security from the physical to logical perspective, from raw signals to data, increases the ability to secure hardware and software and better understand how to perform a gap analysis to set a ground for security, compliance, and continuous improvement.

An understanding of fairly specific skills that complement the corporate environment to have a better knowledge of team building and business requirements is necessary:

Management:

• Provide an endpoint security perspective to particularly high-level members of a corporate environment.
• Understand and essentially minimize overall security cost by understanding how to secure different layers of network infrastructure and physical corporate environment to reduce cost and optimize investment.

__Analytics: __

• To have an overall sort of better concept of how PC security is being essentially breached and essentially understand solutions that will particularly improve the security status.
• Also allows central management of PCs along with compatibility with other system and network administration tools.

Awareness:

• Gather knowledge of PC Security is often overlooked and integrates such knowledge on security awareness training for the company, which is quite significant.

Cybrary alongside Milan Cetic as the instructor has developed a course called Intermediate PC Security that dives deeper into the topic providing learners with information about the importance of PC Security, protecting the PC hardware, protecting the OS, and protecting programs/applications. Those who want to learn more about PC Security should enroll in this course.