Welcome

An introduction to cybersecurity for technical and non-technical audiences alike. Learn how to secure your accounts, data, systems, and software against today’s threats and how to recognize and evaluate tomorrow’s as well, both at home and at work. Learn how to preserve your own privacy. Learn to view cybersecurity not in absolute terms but relative, a function of risks and rewards (for an adversary) and costs and benefits (for you). Learn to recognize cybersecurity as a trade-off with usability itself. Course presents both high-level and low-level examples of threats, providing students with all they need know technically to understand both. Assignments inspired by real-world events.

How to Take this Course

Even if you are not a student at Harvard, you are welcome to “take” this course for free via this OpenCourseWare by working your way through the course’s five weeks of material. For each week, follow this workflow:

flowchart TD
    A[Watch Lecture] --> B[Submit Assignment]

And then submit the course’s final project.

To submit the course’s assignments and final project for feedback, be sure to create an edX account, if you haven’t already. Ask questions along the way via any of the course’s communities!

• If interested in a verified certificate from edX, enroll at cs50.edx.org/cybersecurity instead.
• If interested in transfer credit and accreditation from Harvard Extension School, register at web.dce.harvard.edu/extension/csci/e/159 instead.
• If interested in transfer credit and accreditation from Harvard Summer School, register at web.dce.harvard.edu/summer/csci/s/159 instead.

How to Teach this Course

If you are a teacher, you are welcome to adopt or adapt these materials for your own course, per the license. Additionally, we encourage teachers to participate in the CS50 Educator Workshop to learn more about CS50’s curriculum, technology, and pedagogy.