MBA blog

MBAs against cyber criminals

 

In the modern world of developing big data technologies, anti-hacker skills will be more valued than ever before.

After getting accepted to pursue an MBA at the London Business School, Nuno Sebastiao didn’t choose finance or management. According to The Financial Times, his choice was to declare war on cybercrime.

For Sebastiao, the underlying reasons were not just a fancy. He had a harsh experience of fighting hackers at a company he worked for before – the European Space Agency – and he viewed his future MBA degree as a means of improving cyber safety. As he himself stated, even eight years back he knew that this problem would need “to be addressed” sooner or later.

Upon obtaining his degree, Sebastiao, along with two other Portugal-born tech specialists, launched a startup named Feedzai, whose goal was to identify financial transactions connected with fraud. According to him, he was the first to see the growing issue of internet fraud as such. Nowadays, his company, headquartered in California, has 150 employees, and is still growing, planning to double the staff. Actually, Sebastiao was not the first or the only MBA to find the lucrative opportunities of internet crime fighting. Many more take interest in preventing hacking attacks, and not just verbally: several business schools across the world have already implemented courses on cyber safety into their curricula.

Issues Of Modern Cyber Safety

The main problem awaiting these brave cyber crime fighters is the small quantity of professional engineers to provide the tech basis for anti-hacking systems. Moreover, there is one more issue: not many management level employees know the first thing of coping with hacker attacks. Mostly, companies have the tech staff, but not the managers to guide the process. A very important part of management staff would be to explain the gravity of the situation to the tech people. Mostly, the alarmingly huge risks are still going unnoticed.

Hacking as a tool

One of the MBA programs that teach cyber security is at the Spanish IE Business School, where students participating in the course have their social network accounts hacked, which shows them how laughably easy it is to do such a thing. This fall, a new cyber security masters program is starting in IE. Other European b-schools are also launching similar courses, like the IESE School (Barcelona).

A self-respecting company should not be passive in the matters of cyber security, thinks Javier Zamora, who teaches computer systems at the Barcelona Business School. Being a powerful and expensive company doesn’t help against cyber attacks, as we have witnessed with Sony and Yahoo. Just in 2016, global losses from hacker attacks have been more than 280 billion dollars.

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