The 2016 Outlook For Cybercrime: What To Do To Keep Data And Systems Safe

By Ian Trump, Security Lead, MAXfocus

Peering forward into 2016 and knowing something about the murky cybercrime underworld behavior of 2015, it’s fairly simple to throw down some predictions as to what the Internet will look like over the coming year. If you have been following the information security pace for a while, you know that just as we approach and eclipse the holiday season it’s time for all the security and IT companies to prognosticate with sensationalized headlines such as “The Top 10 IT Security Nightmares for 2016” Or “2016 the year hackers spy on your business, your kids, your house and even your pet!”

Realistically, from a pragmatic view of information security, 2016 will look a lot like 2015; however, I believe we may actually make some progress in securing data against the bad guys. I don’t say this lightly, but many of us working for security companies have spent much of the past few years writing about how to counter the threat of cybercriminals, and we know what actually works. We also know there are many cost-effective and simple things that can be done to make your customer or business #hard2hack.

According to a 2015 Juniper Research report, cybercrime will become a $2.1 trillion problem by 2019. What is unfortunately not mentioned in the report is what the entire online economy will be worth, let’s just hope it’s more than $2.1 trillion, or there probably won’t be an Internet left for anyone.

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