Hack and Defend User Accounts — Course Introduction

User accounts are something we all use every day. They are a fundamental component of the internet and our increasingly digital world. We use them to protect our information and systems for hackers and cybercriminals, yet user accounts are hacked every day. This hands-on course is about how hackers attack user accounts and how we can defend against these constantly evolving attacks.

User Accounts are Powerful, Valuable, and Easy to Hack

User accounts are still the number one target for hackers today. The reason for this is that with a legitimate user account you can access, control, and change all of the information available to that user. To achieve this level of control through a software vulnerability can be incredibly difficult, if not impossible. Yet, with the right username and password, you can do all sorts of incredible things that you shouldn’t. When used as intended, user accounts are very valuable. When used by criminals they are incredibly powerful and dangerous. And, as we will cover in this course, they are really easy to hack.

What Is Covered In This Course

In this course, I’ll be focusing specifically on how hackers target user accounts and how we can defend them against criminals attacks. To do this we need to understand how user accounts work, how developers write user functionality in software applications, how criminals attempt to bypass the controls we put in place, and…