Cyber and Information Operations
Master of Science
Quick Facts
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Demand for qualified cyber professionals continues both nationally and internationally. The Master of Science in Cyber and Information Operations program will prepare you for cyber-related occupations and leadership positions in government, defense, law enforcement, and private industry.
This program is designed with working professionals, both in and out of technologically-oriented disciplines, in mind. The College of Applied Science & Technology (CAST) ensures that online offerings provide interaction, collaboration, hands-on learning, and research opportunities while recognizing working students' challenges.
The curriculum includes offensive and defensive cyber security and information operations content delivered within our state-of-the-art Cyber Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to ensure you attain extensive hands-on experiences and research opportunities to develop the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to succeed.
Graduating from the MS in Cyber and Information Operations program offers tremendous opportunities in various fields as the program meets the most demanding academic and technical requirements. In addition, graduates will be well-qualified to teach future generations of Cyber and Information Operations students, an area within the discipline where there is a significant gap in the number of qualified professionals with the knowledge and skills to be instructors at any level.
Only one enrollment date (fall).
There are synchronous meeting times for courses in this program.
Must meet computer programming requirement:
-Must possess recent (no more than three years) coursework or experience in computer programming.
OR
-Must successfully pass the Python Challenge, a hands-on skills assessment during program on-boarding.
OR
-Students must successfully complete CYBV500: Security Computing.
*Residents of some U.S. Territories may not be eligible. Please see our Eligibility & State Authorization page for more information.
The courses in this program include:
Advances the concepts and principles of development of practical applications supporting cybersecurity and digital investigation activities created through Python programming. Build on programming fundamentals using Python elements, secure programming standards, and developing cybersecurity applications. Examining application requirements, you will develop, debug, execute, and deploy Python scripts.
In this program, you will advance the concepts and principles of cybersecurity across different disciplines, threats, and technologies. Explore the foundational knowledge and importance of Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA Triad) concerning threats, vulnerabilities, and controls. You will also examine cybersecurity attackers' techniques, skills, motives, and vulnerabilities within programming, operating systems, networks, data, and web interfaces.
This course examines cyber and intelligence operations that employ the dark arts of covert communications, steganography, and data hiding that criminals and terrorist organizations use to carry out their operations. The course explores historical cases and recent cyber-attacks and intelligence operations that employ covert communications, steganography, and advanced data exfiltration methods. You will use a host of Python scripts to detect and disrupt these operations and examine and develop advanced offensive covert communication concepts.
This program will provide students with an advanced look at the ethical, legal, and policy issues that arise in the field of cyber and technology. Various ethical, legal, and policy issues from history and current events will be presented. You will gain the knowledge to operate in the current cyber and technology landscape and the tools to analyze and respond to issues in this complex and evolving landscape.
This course examines the methods by which today's security protocols and their implementations are deemed secure and reliable. You’ll work to identify the mechanisms that make communications systems secure and consider how to assess the effectiveness of existing controls. You’ll examine and research methods for quantifying the level of protection provided by existing protocols, including formalized approaches to this type of assessment.
Outcomes
Skills
Earning your Master of Science in Cyber and Information Operations will build core skills, including:
- Cybersecurity principle evaluation
- Python scripting language
- Automated solutions design
- Solving cyber & information operation-related problems
- Technique & tool comparison
- Cybersecurity attack analysis
- Automated detection mechanism development
- Real-world cyber issue solution application
- Cyberattack defense
- Network, compute infrastructure, and applications defense
- Cloud workload and architecture defense
- Adversarial information operations
Potential Career Paths
Graduates of the Cyber and Information Operations MS will be prepared to pursue the following careers:
