Cybersecurity: Attack, Defence, and Operational Practice

COURSE OUTLINE

    1. Introduction: Introduces the cybersecurity landscape, common threat actors, and the ethical foundations of hacking and defence. Students explore major breaches and set up a virtual lab environment for hands-on practice.
    2. Reconnaissance & OSINT: Covers passive and active information gathering techniques used by attackers. Students learn how to use OSINT tools to perform footprinting and gather intelligence about potential targets.
    3. Scanning & Enumeration: Explores the techniques used to scan networks and enumerate services, users, and system information. Hands-on labs use tools like Nmap to map attack surfaces and discover vulnerabilities.
    4. Exploitation Techniques: Focuses on exploiting known vulnerabilities in web applications, systems, and services. Students gain experience using frameworks like Metasploit in a controlled environment.
    5. Post-Exploitation & Lateral Movement: Examines methods attackers use after gaining access, such as privilege escalation, persistence, and moving through a network. Students perform post-exploitation tasks in simulated scenarios.
    6. Defence Mechanisms: Introduces defence-in-depth principles and key defensive technologies like firewalls, antivirus, and IDS/IPS. Students learn how to configure security controls on hosts and networks.
    7. Security Monitoring & Logging: Covers how to detect attacks through monitoring and log analysis. Students work with SIEM tools to identify indicators of compromise and correlate events.
    8. Incident Response: Explains the incident response lifecycle: preparation, detection, containment, eradication, recovery, and lessons learned.
    9. Threat Intelligence: Explores types of cyber threat intelligence (CTI), threat actor profiling, and intelligence feeds. Students learn how to produce and apply intelligence to enhance detection and defence.
    10. Security Operations Centers (SOC): Introduces the function, tools, and processes of a SOC. Students simulate working in a SOC environment, handling alerts, performing triage, and documenting responses.
    11. Malware Analysis & Reverse Engineering: Covers basic malware types, static and dynamic analysis, and sandboxing. Students safely examine malware samples to understand behavior and indicators.
    12. Identity, Access Management & Zero Trust Architectures: Focuses on the principles of secure authentication, authorization, identity governance, and Zero Trust models. Explores multifactor authentication (MFA), SSO, and access control weaknesses.
    13. Capstone & Assessment: Students apply their knowledge in a final presentation or practical demonstration based on a real-world attack-defence or operational security scenario.

The Master of Science Programme in "Advanced Cybersecurity Technologies and Governance" was established as part of the European EU-iNSPIRE project (INnovative multi-diSciPlinary Industry-focused cybersecurity education for upskilling and ReskIlling the EU workforcE), which began in January 2025, has a duration of four (4) years and is co-funded by the European Union through the DIGITAL-2023-SKILLS-05 program (Contract No. 101190054).

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©2026 University of Piraeus • All rights reserved.

The Master of Science Programme in "Advanced Cybersecurity Technologies and Governance" was established as part of the European EU-iNSPIRE project (INnovative multi-diSciPlinary Industry-focused cybersecurity education for upskilling and ReskIlling the EU workforcE), which began in January 2025, has a duration of four (4) years and is co-funded by the European Union through the DIGITAL-2023-SKILLS-05 program (Contract No. 101190054).

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©2026 University of Piraeus • All rights reserved.