The book that you are about to read is one of the many outputs of
our collaborative research team in the Master of Information Systems
Assurance Program (MISAM) at the Concordia University of
Edmonton (CUE) in Alberta, Canada.
CUE’s MISAM program got its start in September of 2013, thanks
to the vision and hard work of Professor Ron Ruhl to whom this manual
is dedicated. Ruhl was also the creator of our Master of Information
Systems Security Program (MISSM) a few years earlier. I should also
mention that MISSM was the first graduate-level information security
program in Canada. Since then, the number of cybersecurity programs
in both Canada and the United States has exploded, but as of this writing,
MISAM is and remains the first and only graduate-level information
systems assurance program in Canada.