BTEC L3 IT

Cyber security is one of the most naturally enticing areas of study in IT-related courses. However, it needs truly engaging content to bring it to life. This pack delivers exactly that. Students encounter hospital hard drives carrying unencrypted patient records appearing on eBay, a single overlooked design feature that contributed to a nuclear meltdown, and the UK's international postal network suspended for days and held to ransom for £60 million.

Detailed and written to directly match A1 of Unit 2 Cyber Security of the BTEC AAQ in Information Technology, this is the first of nine packs and covers threats and vulnerabilities across seven lessons.

The first two lessons cover internal threats. Students work precisely with the terms threat and threat actor before moving through employee sabotage, software licensing breaches, and the risks of unauthorised software. Insecure equipment, visitor vetting, and unsafe practices are all covered before turning to physical disasters, including how individual risks can cascade in ways even prepared organisations don't anticipate.

Malware is also split across two lessons, covering viruses in their different forms, worms, trojans, rootkits, web script attacks, and spyware from keyloggers to device trackers. Lesson four picks up with adware and its legal grey areas, along with a careful study of ransomware.

Hacking follows with an opportunity for those students who like dystopian zombies to get fully engaged. This naturally leads into DoS and DDoS attacks, data tampering at both front and back end, sabotage of IoT devices and critical infrastructure, and AI-generated fakes. Lesson six covers social engineering looking at phishing variants such as vishing and smishing along with pretexting. It then turns to physical methods including tailgating, coercion and shoulder surfing.

The pack closes with the consequences: how threats translate into operational, financial, reputational, and intellectual property losses for the organisations that face them. Finally, after having a grounded understanding of the threats that computer systems face, the roles of NCSC, NIST, and OWASP are covered to show students that cyber security is a field with serious professional organisations behind it.