Can I Start A Cyber Security From University Of Fairfax

The topic Cyber Security itself is vast. Decide upon a starting point, if you have programming skill, Application Security at university of fairfax might be a good point to start. When you learn Application Security, you will pick up bits and bytes of Reverse Engineering, which is a useful generic topic.

As for learning security, you need to work practically, just reading books and watching online video tutorials won't help.
'Wanna learn web sec? try breaking web apps'

To get your hands dirty with some code samples and techniques, here goes my answer :

1. Practical Malware Analysis by Michael Sikorski and Andrew Honig - This book gives brings experience and techniques in a crash course mode. It contains windows exploitation techniques, static and dynamic code analysis methods and primer on commonly used tools for malware analysis.

2. Cryptography and Network security by William Stallings - This book delves into network layer protocols , symmetric and asymmetric key exchanges, number theory, etc. It has a fair amount of mathematical derivations too. So you'll need a paper-pen to understand cryptography concepts.

3. Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering by Eldad Eilam - This book teaches reverse engineering - a very handy skill , often overlooked in college courses. Some of the contents though, might overlap with Practical Malware Analysis.

This list is by no means comprehensive, but with these 3 at your disposal, you'll have a fair idea of :

- How to spot suspicious executables before executing them.
- Reverse engineer malware & suspicious code in sandboxed environments
- Understand how malware spreads through network layers
- Study the cryptographic implementations of secure protocols.
- You'll also be able to appreciate that the day NP hard problems can be solved, all public key secure algorithms stand broken !