CYBER 513: Networking Fundamentals is a foundational technical course designed for non-technical professionals who need to understand how data actually moves across networks and why that movement is at the center of cybersecurity risk. No prior background in networking, IT, or engineering is required. This course focuses on conceptual clarity, professional fluency, and risk awareness.

Nearly every major cybersecurity incident depends on networks, including ransomware, data breaches, espionage, denial-of-service attacks, and election interference. Attackers exploit them, defenders monitor them, and organizations rely on them to function. Yet many professionals responsible for legal, compliance, policy, audit, and risk decisions are expected to reason about “networks” without ever having been taught what that term actually means in practice. CYBER 513 fills that gap.

Rather than treating networking as an abstract or overly technical subject, this course explains networking as an operational system. Students learn how devices communicate, how information is broken into packets, how traffic is routed across the internet, and where security controls can succeed or fail. You will learn what concepts like IP addresses, ports, DNS, firewalls, and protocols really do and why they matter in investigations, contracts, compliance assessments, and incident response.

The course uses real-world cybersecurity scenarios to illustrate networking concepts, including how attackers scan networks, how defenders detect suspicious traffic, and how misconfigurations create legal and operational risk. These examples are used for understanding and analysis, not for teaching exploitation skills. The emphasis is on helping professionals interpret technical explanations, ask better questions, and recognize when network-related risks are being misunderstood or minimized.

By the end of the course, networking will no longer feel like a black box. You will understand how cybersecurity professionals describe network behavior, what common network diagrams and reports are actually showing, and how networking concepts influence decisions about security architecture, vendor relationships, and regulatory obligations.