USF adds cybersecurity to business school curriculum

A business college is not the first place you might think to find a cybersecurity expert, but the educational system is now incorporating a discipline companies need to do daily business.

Cybersecurity specialist Sagar Samtani is has joined the University of South Florida's Muma College of Business, forming a once unlikely partnership.

"This is the next generation of crime and cyber warfare. It's costing the global economy at least $450 billion annually, and that number is growing," says Samtani, who came to USF from the University of Arizona.

He expects many students will be interested in his class, as more companies make cybersecurity a priority and hire more people to support it. 

Samtani says millions of hacked accounts are available for sale through sites where nefarious actors do business.

He says the World Wide Web is like an iceberg.

What shows above the surface is information that can be accessed with normal search engines. What's known as the 'deep web' has unindexed information that can't be found with normal search engines. And the so-called 'dark web' goes a step further to secure users cannot be easily identified. That's where hackers buy and sell stolen information. 

He says, at a minimum, people should use different usernames and passwords from site to site. That way, if your information for one site is stolen, it's not repeated across other platforms.

He says, before you sign up for anything, read the privacy statement.

"Because a lot of these companies may get breached themselves, or they may sell your data to other companies that will get breached in the future," says Samtani.

Evite.com is the latest to confirm a breach with customers' information being sold to the highest bidding criminal.