The Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia offers various computing programmes. One of them is the Master of Cyber Security which is uniquely designed for working professional and their organization’s needs. In addition, we team up with CyberSecurity Malaysia (CSM) to ensure the best knowledge delivery.

This is also inline with the initiative taken by CSM in offering Global Accredited Cybersecurity Education (ACE) Scheme. We believe the Master of Cyber Security and the ACE professional certification offered by UKM and CSM, respectively, bring benefits and opportunities to the cyber security professionals.

Certified examination: https://www.cybereducationscheme.org/web/guest/certified-examination

• Bachelor's Degree in computing from the National University of Malaysia or any other higher education institution approved by the Senate with a minimum Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) of 2.75;
or
• Bachelor's Degree in computing from the National University of Malaysia or any other higher education institution approved by the Senate with a minimum CGPA of 2.50 but not reaching 2.75, can be considered subject to internal assessment;
or
• Bachelor's Degree in computing from the National University of Malaysia or any other higher education institution approved by the Senate with a CGPA below 2.50 with at least 5 years of working experience in the field of computing can be considered;
or
• Bachelor's Degree in a different field from the National University of Malaysia or any other higher education institution approved by the Senate with a minimum CGPA of 2.75, AND have no less than 5 years of working experience in the field of computing, AND need to complete prerequisite courses set by the program;
or
• Other qualifications equivalent to a Bachelor's Degree and have other qualifications or experience approved by the Senate.

TOEFL/IELTS/MUETS/CEFR

For international candidates, requirements for English Language is:

• a. Achieved a TOEFL score of not less than 550; or
• b. IELTS with a level not less than 5.5; or
• c. Other qualifications equivalent to level B2 according to The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR).

Language Requirement

• International students are required to take a Malay language course as an Audit course to be eligible for degree conferment as specified by the University.

  The courses are as follows:

  1. Students from outside the Malay Archipelago – LMCM1083 Malay Language for International Communication

  2. Students from the Malay Archipelago – LMCM1093 Malay Language for Archipelago Students

Learning Outcomes

The programme is designed to produce graduates who will be able to:

• 1. Integrate advanced knowledge related to the field of Cyber Security.
• 2. Produce innovative solutions related to the field of Cyber Security.
• 3. Develop solutions related to the field of Cyber Security using appropriate tools.
• 4. Interact effectively through various discussions related to the field of Cyber Security.
• 5. Communicate effectively through the publication and presentation of technical materials related to the field of Cyber Security.
• 6. Apply numerical skills appropriately in solving problems related to Cyber Security.
• 7. Select appropriate digital technologies in solving problems related to the field of Cyber Security.
• 8. Demonstrate leadership, teamwork, autonomy, and accountability in delivering tasks.
• 9. Show the ability to generate ideas and entrepreneurial thinking in the field of Cyber Security.
• 10. Display behavior consistent with professional, ethical, and social considerations.
• 11. Prove the ability to expand knowledge related to the field of Cyber Security.

Structure And Content

Duration of Study

• Full Time : 1 - 2 years
• Part Time : 2 - 4 years

• Computer Security [TX6114]

  This course presents the basic paradigms and principles of computer security technology and mechanism in modern computer systems. At the end of this course, students should be able to treat computer security problems in a structured way. The course has been structured so that the formal prerequisites only require a minimal knowledge in computer science and mathematics. It is designed to serve as a general introduction to the following topic: computer security fundamentals, security models, cryptography and security issues related to these topics.

• Network Security [TX6124]

  This course covers the basic and intermediate topics in network security. The aim of this course is to prepare students with the concept and knowledge of using network security protocols and applications to provide security over networks and the Internet. Topics covered include the low level frame packet analysis, analyze each layer in TCP/IP (and the equivalent OSI layer) protocol, as well as the possible threats that come in each layer, network security design, email security, web security, wireless security, and honeypot. Hence the use of important network security tools and applications are introduced such in the lab sessions. The course will also look into vulnerabilities of existing network protocols and the way to overcome them. Students are required to accomplish hands-on lab exercises, practical security assessment as problem-based learning and /report assignments.

• Cyber Law and Ethics [TX6134]

  This course analyses the phenomena of cybercrime, legal, and investigation/evidential issues, to enable students to relate the evolution of criminal behaviour in parallel with the advancement of technology. Such knowledge would make students always incalculate the culture of cyber security and ethics. Moreover, the course aims to equip students with knowledge on criminal behaviour and social engineering towards mitigating the risk of cyber threats apart from preparing the students as the planner for computer related activities emphasising or ethics, conventions, and laws. On the whole, the course is geared at producing manpower who will serve as reference in matters pertaining to the organisation, initiation, monitoring and supervision of cyber security acculturation and ethics continuously.

• Information Security Management [TX6144]

  This course includes an overview of conceptual and practical approach to information security management. It focuses on risk management, business continuity management and incident management. Students are firstly introduced to the basic concepts of information security and its management. Later, students are exposed to specific methods, techniques and standards for risk assessment as well as business impact analysis practically. Students are given the opportunity to apply the acquired knowledge and skills in solving real world problems.

• Intrusion Detection and Prevention [TX6224]

  The course covers methodology, technique, and tools for monitoring events in computer or network for preventing and detecting unwanted process activity, recognizing and recovering from malicious behaviour. This course covers the fundamental concepts and design implications required to develop and implement intrusion detection and prevention systems that address security violations in computer systems. The course explains how to detect and prevent unauthorized accesses of networked computers and minimize the damage intruders can do. It emphasizes on techniques and methods for recognizing and handling attacks both automatically and manually. The case studies, large and/or small scales will be covered in this course. Topics to be covered include: main classes of attacks against computer systems, taxonomy and architecture of intrusion detection and prevention systems, network traffic analysis and feature extraction for intrusion detection, signature and anomaly based techniques and machine learning based techniques for intrusion detection. Intrusion detection and prevention systems performance evaluation, issues related to security and defense and network software tools such as bro, Wireshark and Snort will also be discussed.

• Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing [TX6244]

  Ethical hacking, or also known as penetration testing, is a disciplined and methodological approach to test a computer security in a computer network, a wireless environment, web applications and online services. In this course, the students can compare, and evaluate the techniques needed for the purpose of ethical hacking and penetration testing specific systems. The students also can demonstrate practical competence in a number of hacking techniques: social engineering, reconnaissance, scanning, enumeration, exploiting Linux and Windows applications, client side attacks, web application attacks, password attacks, and denial of service attacks. Finally, the students can integrate their knowledge and skills into evolving techniques in information security.

• Security Audit and Assessment [TX6254]

  This course introduces the concept of information system audit and security assessment. It involves techniques in internal audit, and security control in ICT environment, consisting of network, application and operating systems. Students should understand the importance of internal control in an organisation, thus information system auditing. It also discusses audit objectives and procedures for internal controls (management and applications). The use of Computer Assisted Auditing Techniques and Tools (CAATTs) using ACL.

• Software Security [TX6234]

  This course aims to provide skills and knowledge to produce secure software. It starts with the discussion about possible threats on software and its technical cause. In order to reduce this treats, secure software development lifecycle should be in place, hence a few standard lifecycle are presented. Two important software products that are database and web application will be then thoroughly explored in term of its security. Finally, methods to justify that software product has embedded certain level of security aspect are examined.

• Fundamental of Digital Forensics [TD6104]

  This course introduces the fundamental of digital forensics domain. It covers introduction to forensic science, basics and management of investigation, quality assurance and countermeasures. Students would also learn the processes of investigation conducted by an investigator officer or first responder in managing and solving contemporary forensic digital problem related to digital evidence. It covers phases of identification, seizure at the crime scene, preservation, analysis and presentation of findings to stakeholders and court. Additionally, this course also explains management digital forensic lab including process of building a forensic laboratory, and the management of people, technology and activities.

• Digital Media Forensic Analysis [TD6314]

  This course introduces the methods of digital media forensic analysis on digital evidence related to audio, images and videos files. Prior to that, students will learn basic concept about analog and digital signals in the making of the audio, image and video files including techniques in digital media forensics. Then, students will also be able to learn techniques in writing and presenting findings from analysis of specific digital evidence in a group project.

• Data Recovery and Analysis [TD6214]

  This course introduces the methods of data recovery and digital forensic on data evidence related to computer and embedded systems such as smartphones and Cloud. Prior to that, students will learn basic concept about file system of computer and smartphones, Operating System, File signature and computer architecture. Then, student will also be taught on the techniques of data recovery on computer, memory and latest technology. Nevertheless, the student will be equipped with techniques on analysis of computer, latest devices and technology, writing and presenting findings from analysis of specific digital evidence. Finally, this course will generate expert witness for the forensic cases related to computer, memory and latest technology.

• Digital Banking and Financial Services[TX6334]

  This course aims to provide understanding on the application of technology in banking and other financial institutions. The module begins with a discussion on financial system (conventional &Islamic) components that covers: fundamental and history of financial system, central bank and monetary policy, financial instruments, and determination of financial instruments' pricing. Following that, discussion focus on digital banking system which consists of banking network infrastructure, bank core applications, as well as online banking. The discussion continues with security measures and standard practiced by banking and financial institution to ensure security of the system. Common financial frauds that occur as a result of digital system vulnerabilities are also discussed. The module ends with an exposure of fundamental digital forensic investigation in banking and financial services.

• Financial Technology Security and Risk [TX6344]

  Financial technology (FinTech) is a new technology and innovation that aims to make financial services more efficient. This technology covers the areas of big data analytic, online financial services and payment card technology. However, big data analytic will not be covered in this module. The module begins with a discussion on various type of FinTech and its differences. Then, architectures of e-commerce platform with payment gateway and digital wallet, payment card, Secure Electronic Transaction protocol which underpinning the online payment services, blockchain and cryptocurrency will be discussed. The discussion continues with Regulations and standards that FinTech has to comply. After that, students will be challenged to identify security risks in the discussed technology based on accepted security risk management model. Following that, mitigation and control elements that can be applied to manage the risks will be discussed. Throughout the module, real financial crime cases based on the technology vulnerabilities will be used as a case study.

• Strategic Information [TTTX6314]

  The most effective actions often depend on information. Success in the future may well requires organization to change in radical ways in seeing and handling information. This course will give student a holistic view of information and understanding its importance as the strategic source to organizations and the strategy for managing it. This course addresses the fundamental concepts and operational issues surrounding strategic information handling in organizations, thus, It equips students with the necessary basic knowledge and competencies and the need to utilize information efficiently and effectively.

• Cyber Security in Strategic Studies and International Relations [TX6324]

  This course introduces cyber security from the disciplines of strategic and security studies. Students will be exposed to the approaches and paradigms of cyber security in the languages of politics and international security. Students will learn about cyber policy and strategy, cyber conflict ranges from cyber warfare to cyber espionage. By the end of the course, the students will understand cyber security in the field of social sciences especially from the perspectives of international politics, military-strategic, and policy-making.

• Organization-wide Cyber Security Strategy [TX6414]

  In this course, students will be exposed to current cyber threat through the analysis of cyber security annual reports by reputable organization. Besides that, students will examine best practices in cyber security strategy by several organizations. By realizing the dangerous of cyber threat and the importance of best practices, students then will discuss on how to develop cyber security strategies (top-down vs bottom-up, defensive vs offensive) and the most effective approaches to implement strategies in their organization. This includes evaluate organizational current program and develop a roadmap to bring more maturity to the existing organizational security initiatives; develop and align a cyber security strategy to support organizational business goals; and address security gaps, identify new policy and regulations, develop risk management strategies and allocate resources more effectively to improve security for your organization.

• Big Data Analytics and Management [TU6434]

  The goal of this course is to familiarize students with the fundamental concepts of Big Data management and analytics so that they will become competent in recognizing challenges faced by applications dealing with very large volumes of data as well as in proposing scalable solutions for them; and will be able to understand how Big Data impacts business intelligence, scientific discovery and society. This course brings together several key information technologies used in manipulating, storing, and analyzing big data. This course will focus on how to handle, data mine and analyze very large amounts of data or Big data. This course is also aimed to equip students with the technical capability to devise scalable solutions to various classes of big data processing problems. This course will allow the students with an opportunity to work on a real-world data problem by (I) implementing large-scale data processing solutions using data-centric computing tools of their choice; (II) deploying their implementations on a compute cloud service; (III) benchmarking their solutions. MapReduce and NoSQL will be used as tools/standards for creating parallel algorithms that can process very large amounts of data. NoSQL storage solutions will be analyzed for their critical features: speed of reads and writes, data consistency, and ability to scale to extreme volumes. The course material will be drawn from textbooks as well as recent research literature. We review Hadoop, an open source framework that allow us to cheaply and efficiently implement MapReduce on Internet scale problems. This course also covers related tools that provide SQL-like access to unstructured data: Pig and Hive.

• Cyber Sentiment Analytics [TX6354]

  Analytical sentiment of social media resources could leverage the operational aspect, strategic and prediction analysis. Social media is highly potential as a vector in cyber domain. Therefore, this course discusses the analytical approach to social media focusing on cyber domain. Students should be able to analyze sentiment in unstructured data collected from social media resources. Students are also introduced to the artificial intelligence techniques in sentiment analysis. At the end of the course, students are able to apply the analytical approach to analyze the sentiment of social media data.

• Cyber Threat Intelligence [TX6364]

  Cyber threat intelligence represents a force multiplier for organizations looking to empower their response and detection mechanisms to deal with increasingly sophisticated advanced persistent threats. Malware is an adversary's tool, but the real threat is the human, and cyber threat intelligence focuses on countering those flexible and persistent human threats with empowered and trained human defenders. This course will teach the student in the tactical, operational and strategic level of cyber threat intelligence skills. Further, through this course, it able to create better security teams, more efficient and accurate incident response and the student more aware of the evolving threats landscape.

• Project I (4 credits) [TX6074]

  A project is defined as an effort that involves specific processes. Projects are useful for training students in conducting independent research. Through a project, a student should be able to integrate all knowledge and skills that have been obtained throughout the course of study, in order to complete the research. In order to fulfil research requirements, the student is required to prepare a project proposal that contributes to the chosen area of research. After a project title has been agreed upon with the supervisor, the student will conduct a literature review in order to have an understanding of the current status of the research area. A comparison of past research must be performed and critically analysed. This comparison is done to identify problems that need to be examined in the chosen field of research. This leads to the identification of the research element which must be clearly stated after the literature review stage. The project proposal involves the application of existing techniques in a new domain, data or problem area.

• Project II (8 credits) [TX6078]

  From the analysis of Project I that has been conducted, a student needs to model a solution to a problem that has been identified and subsequently demonstrate the solution through the implementation of existing techniques in a new domain, data or problem. At the end of the research, the student needs to prepare a report in a UKM style format that elaborates on the problem to be solved, the analysis, the solution model or development of prototypes and experiments that have been conducted.

• Semester 1 Session 2024-2025
• Semester 2 Session 2024-2025

We have two (2) intakes per year, September (Semester 1) and February (Semester 2). Please apply via online application through here.

RM24,000 for LOCAL candidate.
Complete program fee is RM24,000 which will be paid in THREE (3) installments (FULL-TIME) on per semester basis (1st Sem:RM9,000, 2nd Sem:RM7,500 and 3rd Sem: RM7,500),
OR
FOUR (4) installments (PART-TIME) on per semester basis (1st Sem:RM7,200, 2nd Sem:RM5,600, 3rd Sem:RM5,600 and 4th Sem: RM5,600)

RM32,000 for INTERNATIONAL candidate.
Complete program fee is RM32,000 which will be paid in THREE (3) installments (FULL-TIME/PART-TIME) on per semester basis (1st Sem:RM12,000, 2nd Sem:RM10,000 and 3rd Sem: RM10,000)

• Am I eligible to apply for this program?
  • Please check at the Admission Requirement page, where you must have a bachelor degree in the relevant area. Working experiences in the relevant area are considered too.
• How much does it cost?
  • RM24,000 for LOCAL candidate.
    Complete program fee is RM24,000 which will be paid in THREE (3) installments (FULL-TIME) on per semester basis (1st Sem:RM9,000, 2nd Sem:RM7,500 and 3rd Sem: RM7,500),
    OR
    FOUR (4) installments (PART-TIME) on per semester basis (1st Sem:RM7,200, 2nd Sem:RM5,600, 3rd Sem:RM5,600 and 4th Sem: RM5,600)
  • RM32,000 for INTERNATIONAL candidate
    Complete program fee is RM32,000 which will be paid in THREE (3) installments (FULL-TIME/PART-TIME) on per semester basis (1st Sem:RM12,000, 2nd Sem:RM10,000 and 3rd Sem: RM10,000)
• When is the intake?
  • We have two (2) intakes per year, September (Semester 1) and February (Semester 2). Please apply via online application system (eSpeed).
• Is there any funding or sponsorship that I can apply?
  • Local candidate can apply for PTPTN or funding through KWSP.
• What is the medium of instruction?
  • We use English
• When is our first class?
  • Student under the February intake will start their class in March meanwhile September intake start in October. Class start from 8.30 am to 5.30 pm. Breakfast, lunch and evening break are provided too.