Yesterday was the day I registered for classes for the spring semester. After the Video Image Project and my newfound interest in SRA, I couldn't wait to sign up for SRA 111 with Gerry Santoro. Unfortunately, Mr. Santoro will not be teaching SRA 111 for the Spring semester which really killed my spirits, but still am glad to take SRA 111. According to the decription page at the scheduling of classing website at http://schedule.psu.edu/soc/spring/up/p-z/sra.html#111, it says:
Introduction to Security and Risk Analysis is a preliminary course with a broad focus, spanning the areas of security, risk and analysis. In addition to familiarizing the student with basic technical terminology, it will also touch upon social and legal issues, risk analysis and mitigation, crime intelligence and forensics, and information warfare and assurance.This course will motivate students to understand the requirements for security in any government agency or business organization through the use of case studies. Included in this segment are cases related to cyberterrorism, bioterrorism, and critical infrastructure protection. Some concepts to be covered in the area of information security are: confidentiality, integrity, availability, and non-repudiation. Various methods of safeguarding these security concerns will be discussed, such as: single- and multi-factor authentication, encryption, digital signatures, prevention of denial of service attacks, and so forth. This course also covers social and legal issues related to security, in particular identity theft and social engineering. Topics in this section include identity theft, spam, spyware, and adware. This course also covers the principles and the approaches to risk analysis. Here students study vulnerability analysis, crime and intelligence analysis, forensics, techniques for risk assessment and risk mitigation.
The course will prepare students for more in-depth courses such as SRA 211, SRA 221 and SRA 311
Just reading this makes me can't wait til we get back from our lame, so-called vacation that is only 3 weeks just to attend this class. I mean, I really have no idea what to expect because it is only an introductory to the course, but I doubt that even if this class turns out to be not what I dreamed of, it most definitely kill my spirits about this class. I have became very interested in this field through personal interest, and also my girlfriend is a forensics science major and when she talks to me about her criminology class, I just hear ever word she says (which is rare for guys to do). I also plan on taking a course dealing with world news, like world politics or something like that. I may just be changing majors from IST to SRA. And hopefully, I will be a student of Mr. Gerry Santoro and experience his unique teaching methods!