A few topic suggestions to consider.

Here are a few topic ideas, including topics that other students have previously chosen for case studies or projects. Hopefully these will help inspire your thinking. You’re also welcome to simply use of these topics, so long as nobody else in the class is already using it!

  • APTs and kill chains

  • Amplified DDoS

  • Axie infinity blockchain hack

  • Bangladesh Central Bank robbery (2016)

  • Blockchain re-entrancy attacks

  • Burp Suite

  • Captial One hack

  • Chrysler UConnect hack

  • City of Baltimore ransomware attack (2019)

  • Clickjacking

  • Cryptolocker

  • Cybersecurity of autonomous vehicles

  • DDoS attacks against online multiplayer games

  • Differential privacy

  • DigiNotar

  • Drive-by downloads

  • Dynamic malware analysis

  • eBPF

  • EternalBlue

  • Exploit market

  • Facial recognition

  • Fault injection

  • Fileless malware

  • Fintech vulnerabilities

  • FORCEDENTRY

  • GAMEOVER Zeus

  • Health care vulnerabilities

  • Honeypots

  • ICS vulnerabilities

  • Intel secure boot

  • Keyloggers

  • Magecart

  • Malware analysis

  • Marine navigation spoofing

  • Mirai

  • Morris Worm

  • NotPetya

  • Operation DreamJob

  • Privilege escalation using pass-the-hash

  • Ransomware

  • Rowhammer

  • SAML

  • Software supply chain attacks

  • Spectre/Meltdown

  • Spyware

  • Starwood data breach

  • Stuxnet

  • TPMs

  • Trojan horses

  • UEFI

  • Unatrac phishing attack (2018)

  • W32.HfsAdware.18C9

  • WannaCry

  • WEP/WPA cracking

  • Wireless pentest tools in Kali Linux

Some topics that I will not consider, as they are too close to straighforward and general lecture material:

  • Biometrics (as general principles; going deep on a specific biometric is OK)

  • Cross-site scripting (XSS)

  • Denial-of-service attacks

  • SQL injection