Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting systems, networks, and programs from digital attacks.

Why is cybersecurity important?

In today's connected world, everyone benefits from advanced cyberdefense programs. At an individual level, a cybersecurity attack can result in everything from identity theft, to extortion attempts, to the loss of important data like family photos.

Everyone relies on critical infrastructure like power plants, hospitals, and financial service companies. Securing these and other organizations is essential to keeping our society functioning.

At the end of the day, the goals are simple: safety and security.

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Types of Network Attacks

Reconnaissance Attacks

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Phishing and spear phishing attacks

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Denial of Service Attacks

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Machine Learning in Cybersecurity

  • Intrusion detection: models learn what "normal" traffic looks like and flag deviations. This complements signature engines like Snort.
  • Malware classification: static features (imports, entropy, strings) and dynamic behaviour separate malicious files from clean ones.
  • Phishing detection: URL structure, sender reputation, and message text help catch lures before users click.
  • User & entity behaviour analytics (UEBA): impossible-travel logins, unusual data access, and privilege abuse stand out against a user's baseline.
  • Adversarial ML: attackers try to poison training data or craft inputs that fool models, so models need defending too.

Lab: Phishing URL Risk Scorer

A tiny logistic-regression model that runs entirely in your browser. Enter a URL and see which features push the score up or down.

Examples:
Educational demo. The weights are hand-set to illustrate how feature-based models work, not trained on a real dataset. Never rely on it to judge whether a real link is safe.