Top Threat Predictions for 2016

The year is coming to its end, and it’s the best time to sum up the main security predictions for the next year as well as look back at the main threats of 2015. Traditionally, most security vendors have shared the year-end security reports and predictions with most often and fast-evolving threats. This is a great opportunity to come up with the bottom line and review the most common ones, such as rise of ransomware on Mac OS X, attacks on security vendors, and changing of way how malvertising gets on machines.

What security vendors predict:

Sounds strange, but security vendors predict attacks on them in 2016. As Kaspersky annual report says, there’s an interesting vector in compromising the industry-standard reverse-engineering tools such as IDA and Hiew, debugging tools such as OllyDbg and WinDbg, or virtualization tools such as the VMware suite and VirtualBox.

Besides, significant steps in global movement of cyber crime legislation are predicted. We can remember 2015 as the year when cyber attacks raised to the global level. The famous Anonymous group of hackers and Chinese cyber attacks against the USA show that cyber crime legislation needs to be improved. Probably in 2016 we will see that the government will react faster and will give more rapid response for cyber offences.

According to the vast majority of reports, 2016 is the year of the rise of ransomware, a type of malware that encrypts your machine, important data, separate parts of the system, and asks for money to unblock it. Ransomware usually comes the same way as malware. Researchers say that in 2015 weak attempts to bring ransomware to mobile platforms and Linux occurred, but the OS X remains the most targeted platform in 2016. The best way to secure your system is to instal online security applications for Mac, such as MacKeeper or other similar software.

At the same time most predictions are related to fast growing popularity of ad blockers, which help not only to block annoying ads but also to prevent installing of malvertising. It’s also expected that ad blockers will change the way how advertisement appears in our browsers and possibly will kill malvertising. Good news is that most browsers are planning to improve the built-in ad blocking systems, and the popular third-party browser Mozilla Firefox has already released a new version that allows the users to block ads.

Other regular threats such as phishing and support scams will evolve in the future and use more tricky ways of involving the victims in shady schemes. For some reason it’s implying the security vendors to make necessary improvements. 

Attacks on the social networks have also become very popular in 2015, and now we can see mass startups of social networks with encrypted systems. At the same time such encrypted apps are a real godsend for terrorist groups around the world, which use them to coordinate their attacks.

Will the Internet of Things become the real target for hackers in 2016? Currently there’s no answer to this question. But we can undoubtedly say that the target is now on cars and airplanes. The latest security breach that the researchers found in Jeep Cherokee vehicles has forced Fiat Chrysler to recall 1.4 million cars back to the US. Generally in 2015 we saw a record number of car software hacking. Probably in 2016 this sector will attract attention of security vendors and we will probably see more online security products for cars and home.