Towards a more effective way of teaching a cybersecurity basics course

The Cybersecurity Basics course is an interdisciplinary course for the Criminology, Management Information Systems and Computer Science students at IUP. The course introduces computer security by focusing on host security. This paper describes laboratory exercises developed as part of a project to augment and improve on the teaching of the Cybersecurity Basics course. Nine Linux-based laboratory exercises were developed. A poster paper, based on the developed laboratory exercises was presented at the SIGSCE Symposium [5]. The developed lab exercises are being pilot tested in the Cybersecurity Basics course at IUP.