John McAfee, CEO at MGT Capital Investments, Inc. (MGTI) provides CSO with his predictions for 2017.

1. “IoT denial of service attacks on major Internet carriers, like the one carried out on Dyn earlier year will become commonplace, and the severity will be orders of magnitude greater than what we have seen. The 2016 IoT DDoS attacks were, I am convinced, merely designed to calibrate their weaponized software. 2017 will see serious internet outages.”

[ MORE PREDICTIONS: What 2017 has in store for cybersecurity ]

2. “The anti-virus paradigm will finally been seen as a dead paradigm. I invented this paradigm and predicted its demise more than 10 years ago. Every major hack of the American government and American enterprises were protected by multiple anti-virus software products. The world must move to proactive systems that detect the presence of a hacker within milliseconds of the hackers' entry - months or years before the hacker can plant the malware that [anti-virus] systems can detect.”

3. "Intelligence agencies will finally accept the fact that a sophisticated Nation State can perpetrate any hack and make it point to any Nation or agency that they choose. Attribution for a hack, in this day and age, is statistically, a near impossibility. Hopefully this will motivate our leadership to focus on cyber defense rather than cyber weaponry and abandon the futile and obviously erroneous pursuit of forensic science as a means of identifying a hacker. This works for a 15-year-old who obviously knew no better, but Nation States and organized hacking organizations will never be trapped in this manner. It's like determining that America obviously developed the Atom Bomb because "America" and "Atom" start with the same letter. It is a futile, senseless science that completely disregards the fact that more than 75 percent of all hacks are social engineering. Only 25 percent is technology."

Asked for more on what he expects in 2017, McAfee stated “Ashley Madison, multi-billion dollar company, went bankrupt because of a hack a little more than a year ago. We will see dozens of such cases in 2017.”

McAfee’s predictions seem to align with the recent trend of data breach and cyberwarfare activity.

We’ll check back in with McAfee for a mid-year update.

PAST MCAFEE VIDEO: