Frank Katz

Assistant Professor | Georgia Southern University

Savannah, GA, UNITED STATES

Frank Katz's specialties include information security/cyber security, systems analysis and design, and database analysis and design.

Spotlight

Experts in the media – Covering ransomware attacks? Georgia Southern's Director of Applied Cyber Education is the go-to expert for reporters

2021-06-22

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Biography

Professor Frank H. Katz is Assistant Professor of Information Technology in the College of Engineering and Computing and Director of the Center for Applied Cyber Education at Georgia Southern University. He received a B.A. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Florida in 1977, and a M.S. in Management from the College of Business Administration at Georgia State University in 1987.

While at UF, Frank was an Army ROTC Scholarship cadet, and after graduation he served four years in the US Army as a Combat Engineer officer. Frank served as a platoon leader, adjutant, and battalion maintenance officer in the 92nd Engineer Battalion at Fort Stewart. For six months he helped test the TADS/PNVS laser guidance system for the Hellfire anti-tank missile, fired from the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama.

After serving in the Army for four years, Frank left and went to work in the Atlanta office of the Management Information Consulting Division of Arthur Andersen & Co. (which became Andersen Consulting, and is now Accenture) as a "staff consultant," doing programming and analysis jobs for clients in Atlanta and throughout the Southeast. After a year and four months with AA & Co., Frank left to become a Programmer/Analyst for the Coca-Cola Company. Subsequent positions include Systems Analyst at Great Dane Trailers, Inc., Projects Manager at Savannah Foods and Industries, and Billing Support at HO Systems.

In August 2002, Frank left the corporate world behind and began his new career in academia as an Assistant Professor of Information Technology. At the School of Computing's 2003 Spring Banquet, Frank was inducted into Armstrong's Gamma Chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the National Computer Honor Society. Frank also holds memberships with the Association for Computing Machinery, the Military Cyber Professionals Association, AFCEA, and ISSA - the Information Systems Security Association.

Areas of Expertise (5)

Higher Education

Systems Analysis and Design

Information Security

Cyber Security

Database Analysis and Design

Accomplishments (1)

Upsilon Pi Epsilon (professional)

National Computer Science Honorary

Education (2)

BA: University of Florida, Computer and Information Sciences 1977

MS: Georgia State University, Management 1987

Affiliations (5)

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research, and Practice : Associate Editor
Military Cyber Defense Organization : Life Member
Association for Computing Machinery : Member
AFCEA : Member
Infragard : Member, Coastal Empire Chapter

Links (2)

Media Appearances (6)

St. Joseph’s/Candler, police investigating after hospital’s computer network hit by ransomware

WTOC-TV tv

2021-06-17

“The bad guy is really not really looking for everything down to your Instagram profile. They’re really not, they may obtain that, but what they are really trying to do is just what we call a denial of service attack, which is deny service to the hospital and extort money from them to get their service back,” Katz said. Katz says those who are concerned about the cybersecurity at the health system should change their passwords, check their credit report and be aware of suspicious links, messages and more. He says hospitals have been the victim before.

Savannah hospitals trying to recover from ransomware attack

The Associated Press. online

2021-06-21

Frank Katz, who directs the Center for Applied Cyber Education at Georgia Southern University’s Armstrong Campus in Savannah, said hospitals can be targets for extortion as well as sources of personal identifying information that can aid in further fraud.

Savannah Hospitals Trying to Recover From Ransomware Attack

U.S. News & World Report online

2021-06-21

St. Joseph’s/Candler outage continues after ransomware attack

WSAV online

2021-06-18

Dr. Frank Katz, director of the Center for Applied Cyber Education at Georgia Southern University, says hospitals are often easy targets. Having so many employees, he says user IDs and passwords can be easy to figure out.

Georgia Southern Center for Applied Cyber Education to take part in cyber exercise

Georgia Southern University Newsroom online

2020-09-18

On Sept. 24, Frank Katz, director of the Center for Applied Cyber Education at Georgia Southern, will represent the University at Jack Voltaic 3.0, the first all-virtual cyber exercise hosted by the Army Cyber Institute. The exercise will simulate a cyber attack in Savannah, and Katz will observe the participants’ decisions during the attack to help better educate his cyber security students on what to do in similar scenarios.

Privacy concerns arise over COVID-19 tracing apps

WSAV online

2020-08-28

Smartphone users have taken to social media to express their concerns over data being shared with COVID-19 tracing apps. WSAV NOW spoke with Frank Katz, an assistant professor of I.T. at Georgia Southern University, about whether you should be concerned.

Articles (5)

Adversarial Thinking: Teaching Students to Think Like a Hacker

Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Conference on Cybersecurity Education, Research, and Practice

Today’s college and university cybersecurity programs often contain multiple laboratory activities on various different hardware and software-based cybersecurity tools. These include preventive tools such as firewalls, virtual private networks, and intrusion detection systems. Some of these are tools used in attacking a network, such as packet sniffers and learning how to craft cross-site scripting attacks or man-in-the-middle attacks.

Breadth vs. Depth: Best Practices Teaching Cybersecurity in a Small Public University Sharing Models

The Cyber Defense Review

In recent history, America witnessed cyber breaches at Snapchat, where employees had personal information stolen by way of a phishing scam; Premier Healthcare, which saw unencrypted data pertaining to more than 200,000 users stolen from a laptop; Verizon Enterprise Solutions, who had the information of 1.5 million customers stolen by hackers; and LinkedIn, who saw a 2012 data breach “come back to haunt them when 117 million e-mail and password combinations stolen by hackers four years ago popped up online.”

A Comparison of Different Methods of Instruction in Cryptography

Information Security Education Journal

Cryptography is the foundation on which information and cyber security is built. As Mark Stamp has written, “cryptography or ‘secret codes’ are a fundamental information security tool.” (Stamp, et al., 2006) Without the ability to encrypt and decrypt messages or data, the fundamental characteristic of confidentiality, which is the prevention of “unauthorized reading of information,” (Stamp, et al., 2006) is lost.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Instruction Based on Material From a Hands-On Workshop in Information Assurance

InfoSecCD '13: Proceedings of the 2013 on InfoSecCD '13: Information Security Curriculum Development Conference

In computer science curricula, we teach our students to program on their own, while in the "real world," programming is accomplished via cobbling together modules and subroutines stored in repositories that were written by others. Similarly, teaching Cyber Security or any other curricula does not occur in a vacuum. Instructors may want to be imaginative and create their own case studies and laboratory exercises, but time, and especially in the current era, financial constraints, affect all faculty members.

The creation of a minor in cyber security: the sequel

InfoSecCD '12: Proceedings of the 2012 Information Security Curriculum Development Conference

In October 2010, the paper "Curriculum and Pedagogical Effects of the Creation of a Minor in Cyber Security" was presented at InfoSecCD 2010. It described the issues related to the creation of a minor in Cyber Security at Armstrong Atlantic State University (AASU, and its effects on the curriculum of AASU's Information Technology major. The conclusion of that paper left the fate of the minor in doubt, stating that "there is a lot of curriculum committee work to be done before the minor is either removed or properly and fully supported."