Week 1: Ethics, Careers, and the CIA Triad

Cybersecurity does not start with exploits. It starts with responsibility.

Garden State Cyber I opens by asking three questions that will follow you through the entire course:

1. Why does cybersecurity exist?
2. What are you authorized to do?
3. What exactly are you trying to protect?

This week establishes the course boundary, introduces cybersecurity career paths, builds a classroom Code of Behavior, and gives you the first major security model: the CIA Triad.

CIA stands for:

• Confidentiality: information is available only to authorized people.
• Integrity: information remains accurate, complete, and trustworthy.
• Availability: authorized users can access information and services when they need them.

These are not vocabulary words to memorize and forget. You will use them to explain failures, choose controls, and justify decisions for the rest of the course.

Required ethics agreement

Garden State Cyber I requires the course ethics agreement to be completed during the first two weeks of class. The classroom Code of Behavior you build this week becomes part of that process. The final agreement must be signed by the student and parent/guardian according to the district course requirement before later security labs continue.

What you will do

Lesson 1: Why Cybersecurity Exists

You will examine authorization and scope, connect them to professional responsibility, and define the boundary for classroom security work.

Lesson 2: Authorization, Ethics, and the CIA Triad

You will learn to identify confidentiality, integrity, and availability failures and match defensive controls to the specific property at risk.

Lesson 3: Code of Behavior and CIA Evidence Lab

You will build the class Code of Behavior and analyze synthetic incidents without inventing evidence or crossing the exercise boundary.

What you will produce

By the end of the week, you should have:

• an Authorization Card
• a CIA Protection Card
• a class Code of Behavior
• a CIA Evidence Table
• a short career connection explaining how a cybersecurity role would use evidence and controls
• the course ethics agreement ready for the required student and parent/guardian sign-off within the first two weeks

The standard for this course

A weak security answer sounds like this:

Something got hacked, so we need better security.

A stronger answer sounds like this:

The shared drive exposes information to people who do not need access, so confidentiality is at risk. The evidence is the supplied permission setting. Restricting access to the approved group addresses that failure. The evidence does not show that anyone outside the class actually opened the files.

That is the habit we are building.

Name the property. Cite the evidence. Stay inside scope. Choose a control that actually solves the problem.