CYB807 – Cyber Resilience in Organisations

Given the increasing prevalence of cyber-attacks in modern organisations, incident response is an essential skill for cybersecurity practitioners. Cybersecurity strategy and resilience must be paired with incident response, as incident response is an essential component of a strategy as well as the method for refining and amending future strategies. Students who can analyse an incident and learn how to adapt will better prepare their organisations for the modern threat landscape.

In this unit, students will examine the fundamental principles and practices of cyber strategy, resilience and incident response in organisations. The unit is divided into three parts. The first part presents foundational knowledge on strategy before describing the strategic-level cyber context of modern organisations. Key topics include the threat landscape, particularly Advanced Persistent Threats or APTs, the kill chain model, and broader operational, legal, regulatory and contractual obligations for organisations. The second part focuses on cybersecurity strategies, particularly the two paradigms of prevention and response followed by a deep study of the incident response process and its key organisational functions such as SOCs or security operations centres, Cyber War Rooms and Bridge lines. The final part presents the anatomy of a crisis before constructing the role of a Chief Crisis Officer and discussing advanced topics such as agility and organisational learning from past incidents.

Learning outcomes:

• Describe and critically analyse the role of cyber threat actors in the contemporary context of organisations and society
• Describe and critically analyse each phase of the cyber-attack lifecycle
• Describe and critically reflect on the role and diverse perspectives related to cyber strategy and resilience in the context of contemporary organisations
• Critically analyse organisational response to cyber-attack from the integrated perspective of people, process and technology
• Define agility in incident response and identify key people, process and technology barriers to achieving agility in organisations
• Design a strategic plan to develop cyber resilience and response agility for organisations