The Data Protection Act, the Computer Misuse Act, the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, and the Health and Safety Act, and how they apply to computer users and IT professionals.

A detailed look at computer crimes from identity theft and phishing to malware attacks, viruses, worms, Trojan horses, spyware, logic bombs and denial-of-service attacks.

Practical measures to prevent computer crime, the CIA triad of computer security, and the mechanisms used to protect systems: authentication, encryption, firewalls, intrusion detection and digital signatures.

How the widespread use of computers and IT has reshaped society into a global village, and the positive and negative impacts of ICT on people and organizations.

The positive and negative effects of social networking, from easy access to information and creativity to distraction, privacy issues and time loss.

Cloud, time-sharing, client-server, personal, distributed and cluster computing – the different ways processing and resources can be organized across systems.

The characteristic features of a word processor like Microsoft Word, and how a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel organizes data into cells, formulas and functions.

How hardware, software, and network resources combine to form a computing environment, with examples of each category.

The main components of a computer: keyboard, mouse, monitor, and more, illustrated with labeled diagrams.

The difference between data and information, plus the five main forms of data: text, numerical, image, audio, and video.