Cyber Operations
Master of Science
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Demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals continues to grow across the United States and around the world. The Master of Science in Cyber Operations program prepares graduates for cyber-related occupations and leadership positions in government, defense, law enforcement, and private industry.
This program is designed with working professionals in mind. The College of Information Science (InfoSci) ensures that online offerings provide interaction, collaboration, hands-on learning, and research opportunities while recognizing working students' challenges. The program’s incorporation of cybersecurity principles and foundational programming concepts for cyber operations provides a pathway for success for students regardless of their technical background.
The curriculum includes offensive and defensive cybersecurity and the integration of artificial intelligence in the cyber operations domain. Coursework emphasizes hands-on experience with real-world applications, building students’ confidence in utilizing industry tools that prepare them with the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to succeed in cyber-related careers.
Graduating from the MS in Cyber Operations program provides exceptional opportunities in various fields as the program is built upon rigorous academic and technical foundations. In addition, graduates will be well-qualified to teach future generations of Cyber Operations students, addressing a significant need for qualified instructors who can develop the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.
Three enrollment dates: Spring, Summer and Fall.
All courses in the program are asynchronous.
*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 course presents the theoretical foundations and hands-on techniques of AI and machine learning for cyber operations and defense. Students will learn to design, implement, evaluate, and harden AI systems that detect, respond to, and model cyber threats in adversarial environments
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 Operations will build core skills, including:
- Cybersecurity principles evaluation
- Python scripting language
- Automated solutions design
- Solving cyber operations-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
- Core Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning techniques in cybersecurity
Potential Career Paths
Graduates of the Cyber Operations MS will be prepared to pursue the following careers:
