Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has a message for state leaders across the nation: Cybersecurity has to be a top item on their policy platforms. And, by the way, he very much intends to make Virginia the cyber capital of the United States.

Healthcare organizations must take several important steps to protect their environments against ransomware attacks, says Mac McMillan, CEO of the security consulting firm CynergisTek. He outlines key measures in this interview.

Organizations can apply user behavioral analytics - the practice of reacting to how people behave in the information security realm - to better spot and block data breaches, says Fortscale's Kurt Stammberger.

Finding security staff members with the right mix of technical qualifications and real-world experience is a difficult challenge, says Curt Kwak, CIO of Proliance Surgeons, who describes his strategies.

In light of the rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape, a top goal at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is to identify and stop security incidents before the damage escalates, says John Houston, vice president, information security and privacy.

Attacks against the cloud, using the cloud for command and control of malware attacks, and securing endpoints are posing big worries for all industries, says Brian Kenyon of Blue Coat Systems.

Identity management is going to be a big issue in 2016, and emerging authentication tools, such as biometrics, could very well gain a more significant foothold, although not without posing new risks, says Steve Martino, CISO at Cisco Systems.

The "industrialization" of cybercrime, remote-access attacks and mobile-banking application and online-browser overlay attacks are trends the financial industry should monitor this year, says George Tubin of IBM Security Trusteer.

Too many companies that provide cybersecurity solutions are failing to focus on helping organizations control risk at a reasonable cost, argues Malcolm Harkins, CISO at Cylance.

Despite the pervasiveness of data breaches, healthcare organizations are still playing catch-up on implementing strong, risk-based security programs, rather than focusing solely on HIPAA compliance, says David Finn of Symantec. He offers a preview of his session at the HIMSS 2016 Conference about a new survey.