The CIA triad, today's threat landscape, the difference between IT and OT security priorities, and a roadmap of this 18-module program.
Cybersecurity spans protecting information systems (IT) and the physical, real-time systems that run plants, grids, and utilities (OT/ICS). This module builds the foundational mental model the rest of the program assumes: the CIA triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability) and why OT flips the usual IT priority order to put Availability first, the modern threat landscape from opportunistic malware to targeted nation-state actors, and why defense-in-depth — layered controls rather than a single perimeter — is the organizing principle behind every later module.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a control system that would be considered "insecure" by IT standards (no MFA, unencrypted legacy protocols) can still be an acceptable engineering tradeoff — a nuance Module 3's Purdue model content and Module 7's IEC 62443 content each return to from their own side of the problem.