Fundamentals of Cybersecurity: Threats and Defenses
A practical two-day introduction to how modern cyber-attacks work, how defenders respond, and how the pieces of cybersecurity fit together.
Coming from Alice & Bob?
The comic is meant to make cybersecurity approachable. This class helps you go deeper.
If Alice, Bob, Vera, Eve, and Walter helped spark your interest, this course is a natural next step. It takes the same beginner-friendly spirit and turns it into a practical, structured introduction to how cybersecurity actually works.
You do not need prior experience. You just need curiosity, a willingness to learn, and an interest in understanding the threats, technologies, and decisions that shape modern cyber defense.
Build a Defensible Cybersecurity Foundation
Cybersecurity can feel overwhelming when every conversation begins with unfamiliar tools, acronyms, and worst-case scenarios. This course is designed to cut through that noise and help you understand the larger system behind the technology.
Over two instructor-led days, you will examine how attackers move from opportunity to impact and how defenders combine people, processes, technology, evidence, and judgment to reduce risk. The emphasis is on understanding before tooling, so the concepts remain useful as technologies and job roles change.
You do not need to travel to Deadwood to participate.
Wild West Hackin' Fest offers a virtual training registration option, allowing remote students to attend the live class and complete the guided activities from home or work.
What You Will Explore
A guided tour through the major threats, technologies, and decisions that shape modern cyber defense.
Attacks and Malware
Understand threat actors, phishing, ransomware, social engineering, indicators of compromise, and the progression of a cyber-attack.
Vulnerabilities and Risk
Learn how defenders identify weaknesses, evaluate uncertainty, and prioritize remediation rather than treating every finding equally.
Cryptography
Explore encryption, hashing, keys, certificates, integrity, authentication, and the role cryptography plays in protecting data and trust.
Endpoints and Networks
Examine hardening, patching, segmentation, firewalls, monitoring, ports, protocols, and the evidence defenders use to understand activity.
Cloud and Identity
Understand shared responsibility, access management, exposed services, cloud misconfigurations, and the importance of identity-centered defense.
Artificial Intelligence
Consider how attackers and defenders use AI, along with the risks of data leakage, prompt injection, unreliable output, and insecure use.
Who Should Attend?
This course is designed for:
- Aspiring cybersecurity professionals
- Students and career-changers exploring the field
- Early-career analysts and junior security staff
- System administrators and IT generalists moving into security
- Technical managers who need a practical understanding of cybersecurity risk
No prior IT or cybersecurity experience is required.
Hands-On Without the Unnecessary Friction
The guided labs focus on investigation, analysis, and decision-making rather than competition or speed. Students use a virtual lab environment, so there is no need to install and maintain a complicated security environment after class.
You will need a laptop capable of running a modern web browser. Basic familiarity with computers is helpful, but curiosity and a willingness to ask “why” matter much more.
Understand the Threat. Learn to Defend.
You do not need to memorize every security product or choose a specialty before you begin. Start by building a reliable mental model of how attacks happen, what defenders can observe, and how good security decisions support the mission.
Join us remotely at Wild West Hackin' Fest Deadwood and take the next step into cybersecurity with a foundation designed to remain useful throughout your career.