Week 3: Malware and Security Threats

This week moves from account protection to malicious software.

The goal is not to memorize a list of virus names. You will learn to recognize behavior, explain how malware can affect people and systems, and connect those behaviors to defensive controls.

This week

Lesson 1: Malware Is a Behavior, Not Just a Name

Compare viruses, worms, trojans, ransomware, spyware, keyloggers, and other malicious behavior. Map delivery, execution, persistence, impact, evidence, and defense.

Lesson 2: Historic Malware: What Changed After the Incident?

Research one teacher-approved historical malware event. Build an evidence-backed timeline, CIA impact analysis, and short threat briefing focused on the defensive lessons.

Lesson 3: Build a Malware Defense Plan

Analyze a synthetic event log and design layered preventive, detective, and recovery controls. Treat users as part of the system instead of pretending awareness alone can solve every failure.

What you will produce

• malware-behavior classifications
• two behavior maps
• historic incident timeline and case brief
• control-to-behavior matrix
• synthetic event-log analysis
• five-control defensive stack

By the end of the week, you should be able to answer a more useful question than "What kind of malware is this?"

You should be able to answer:

What is it doing, what evidence supports that claim, and where can a defender interrupt the behavior?