Cyber Security (Postgraduate MSc)

Develop a deep understanding of cyber security to help prevent the risk of cyber-attacks, enhancing your career potential in industry. Use your background degree or equivalent background in IT to develop your ability to implement cyber security mechanisms into any business or organisation. 

As part of this course, you’ll:

• Develop in-demand practical skills in cyber security 
• Study key topics you’ll need working in industry such as authentication, access control, malware, vulnerabilities, secure coding, sandboxing, virtualisation, vulnerability assessment, Unix security, and ethical hacking and penetration testing techniques
• Learn through short, recorded lectures, lab and support documents with clear guidance, illustrative screen shots, and audio recordings

Teaching and learning

• You’ll learn via oVirt, an online virtualised computer suite. This utilises a novel system, “Hacktivity”, developed in house, which automatically generates unique virtual machines for each student providing individualised security/hacking challenges and environments. 
• You’ll work through security labs with automated chatbots (our Hackerbot system) that present hacking and defensive challenges. Hackerbots will carry out real security attacks on the network against your VMs for defensive and investigation tasks. Completing tasks will reward you with “flags” for capture the flag (CTF) based assessments and hacking competitions.

Cyber security and digital forensics

• If you already have an understanding of cyber security from an undergraduate degree, we offer MSc Cyber Security & Digital Forensics which will enable you to specialise in the field.

Why study the MSc Cyber Security course at Leeds Beckett University?

• Professionally accredited – by the British Computer Society and provisionally certified by National Cyber Security Centre
• Access to specialist software – including Hacktivity and Hackerbot to enable you to put your knowledge into practice
• This course will provide you with advanced knowledge in cyber security and will broaden your employability prospects within the IT industry. 

Possible career paths could include roles such as:

• Security architect Malware analyst Security analyst System/network/web/application penetration tester Security auditor CISO/ISO Director of security Incident responder
• Security has wide reaching implications and these skills can benefit many other ICT roles including software developer/engineer, system administrator, network administrator and management positions.