Security and Ethical Hacking Specialization
This specialization is intended for computer scientists and engineers wishing to expand their technical expertise to the realm of Computing Security, with a broad skill-set and understanding of offensive Cybersecurity. Regardless of what area of Computing you may want to specialize in – from networking and systems to algorithms in machine learning and AI – a deep understanding of how the underlying technologies work, and how they can be abused, is essential to a robustly functioning, secure computing environment.
You will learn how to:
- Analyze and exploit weaknesses in system security (lateral movement, privilege escalation) bypassing mitigations and basic defenses.
- Identify weaknesses in binary programs, web applications and agentic AI systems. You will also explore adversarial machine learning attacks.
- Develop an adversarial mindset through exposure to a wide variety of offensive security topics in several areas of computing.
Courses
- Security & Ethical Hacking: Attacking the Network
- Security & Ethical Hacking: Attacking Unix and Windows
- Security & Ethical Hacking: Attacking Web and AI Systems
This specialization can be taken for academic credit as part of CU Boulder’s MS in Computer Science or MS in Artificial Intelligence degrees offered on the Coursera platform. Learn more: MS in Computer Science and MS in Artificial Intelligence.