About

Welcome to the Cyber Operations blog!

For many years, I have been teaching courses in cyber security whose focus has been on the practical components of the discipline- mostly on the defensive side, with occasional forays into offensive security. These are very difficult courses to teach, primarily because the best way to learn these types of topics is for students to “lay hands on keyboards”- and they can’t do that while I am talking.

Over the years, I have increasingly moved away from lecture in class and towards a guided learning approach, where students come to grips with the material primarily through their own direct experience, rather than through listening to me talk. To guide them, I have developed progressively more detailed course notes and projects for the students. These were initially distributed as class hand outs, then moved to online documents.

On this site, you will find the class notes used for the last three years of the course, and much more. You will also find Etudes- these are simple studies of topics that are not important enough to make it into the regular class notes, but are of value in and of themselves. You will also find the Training Room, a section devoted to students who just want to learn more about security, so that they can learn some of the prerequisite material for the course. You will also find some student research papers. I have had the good fortune to work with students on some independent projects, and a few of those students have given me permission to publish their work here.

I hope that you find these pages useful; please feel free to leave a comment.

You can also follow me on Twitter at @MikeOLearyTU

Best,

Mike O’Leary
Director, School of Emerging Technologies
Towson University