AP Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity Objectives

Security professionals play a crucial role in protecting their organizations in today's complex threat landscape. They are responsible for protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information and information systems used by their organizations.

Cybersecurity Objectives

Cybersecurity has three complementary objectives, known as the CIA triad:

• Confidentiality ensures that unauthorized individuals are not able to gain access to sensitive information. Cybersecurity professionals develop and implement security controls, including firewalls, access control lists, and encryption, to prevent unauthorized access to information.
• Integrity ensures that there are no unauthorized modifications to information or systems, either intentionally or unintentionally. Integrity controls, such as hashing and integrity monitoring solutions, seek to enforce this requirement.
• Availability ensures that information and systems are ready to meet the needs of legitimate users at the time those users request them. Availability controls, such as fault tolerance, clustering, and backups, seek to ensure that legitimate users may gain access as needed.

Nonrepudiation, while not part of the CIA triad, is also an important goal of some cybersecurity controls. Nonrepudiation means that someone who performed some action, such as sending a message, cannot later deny having taken that action. Digital signatures are a common example of nonrepudiation.

Exam Note: Remember the main components of the CIA triad security model are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Also know that nonrepudiation is the assurance that something cannot be denied by someone.