Due to high rates of breaches, we can’t conclude the year 2016, the best year for cyber security. We have witnessed many attacks like ransomware, medical data theft, Apple encryption, Tax fraud and many other attacks that victimized many popular organizations like University of central Florida, Internal revenue service, UC Berkeley, Wendy’s, LinkedIn, Oracle, Cisco, Yahoo and many others. While companies continue to fight the good fight against hackers and identity theft, we have no doubt 2017 will bring some breaches no one could ever expect.

Here are some upcoming challenges that 2017 will bring to us:

Connected systems and devices:

A Rapidly growing number of IoT devices and connected infrastructure will bring new security risk and expand the surface for cyber attacks. The hackers will likely exploit vulnerabilities within the systems to gain access to an organization’s network and critical assets. Moreover, the customers are also not safe, hacker will try o exploit their devices to access the organization’s network as consumer devices are not secure enough.

Demand for Cyber Security Skills Rises:

A global shortage of cyber security-skills in the workplace possibly will make organizations more advantageous targets for hacking. Demand for expertise will continue to rise as cyber criminals are rapidly growing in numbers and coming up with enhanced attacking vectors. Also, with companies increasingly in-sourcing their security needs, internal training and skills growth has to continue to accelerate. With more than a million vacant positions worldwide, there have never been more cyber security jobs available in 2017.

State-sponsored attacks:

Cyber criminals sponsored by nation-states will remain a headache for governments and businesses around the world. State-sponsored attacks will be more prominent challenge in 2017, where hackers are likely to use ever-more sophisticated techniques to sabotage the elections, bring disorder to business operations and steal confidential government plans.

Cloud hacking:

According to the Netwrix 2016 Cloud Security Survey, cloud technology is rapidly gripping the IT world, with the number of organizations using the technology increasing from 43% in 2015 to 68% in 2016. However, growing volumes of sensitive data stored in the cloud will attract hackers to innovate new ways to compromise cloud providers. At the same time, in 2017 organizations will likely grow their interest in adopting and switching to cloud technologies.

Untraceable attackers:

Hackers will look to become more organized and more commercialized, perhaps even having their own call centers. They will look to initiate attacks from countries where cybercrime is barely regarded as a crime that will help them to bypass the government laws. Moreover, they will continue to exploit the Dark Web, a small portion of the Deep Web, in order to successfully hide and to communicate with other criminals.

Need of Cyber Insurance:

As cyber criminals continue to evolve their attacking techniques, the risk of cyber breach will make organizations to look forward to go after insurance plans. Most of the time, the breaches leave organizations bankrupt or near to bankruptcy. To avoid these worst situations, the need for cyber insurance will grow in 2017. It will help them to cover the loss of reputation, customer’s trust, future revenue or other exposure, and improvement costs for security infrastructure or system upgrades.

Whatever the 2017 will bring to us, we must prepare ourselves. We can boost our chances of success by taking a moment to review our cyber security planning and systems to ensure the readiness to every possible challenge.