Cybersecurity reaches a critical point, FIU and OAS create specialized program

The magnitude of cybersecurity threats has never been higher and shows no sign of slowing down. The global cost of cyberattacks is forecast to grow from $400 billion today to $2.1 trillion by 2020 and experts anticipate a 2 million person shortage in information security professionals by the same year.

The Cybersecurity Certificate is offered jointly by FIU’s College of Business and Green School of International and Public Affairs, with content contribution and endorsement of the OAS Cyber Security Program. The two-day program will be held Oct. 17-18 in Miami.

Miami technology pioneer Manuel Medina will be the program’s keynote speaker. Medina is now CEO of Cyxtera Technologies, a data center services venture specializing in cybersecurity. The company combined an international network of CenturyLink data centers with four cybersecurity and data analytics companies.

A conversation with Manny Medina:

We’ve seen high-profile hacking cases at Equifax, the SEC, Deloitte, Verizon… is anything safe from hackers? Adversaries continue to get past network perimeter defenses where their attacks can spread like wildfire across internal corporate networks. The traditional perimeter is easily compromised so we must turn our focus to a new approach, like a software-defined perimeter. Cybersecurity professionals need to make it harder for any adversary to operate in sensitive interior segments by deploying protections such as robust authentication, network segmentation and advanced analytics to better understand what’s going on within their IT environments.

Read the full story in today’s edition of BizNews.