Expect rebooted European Union data privacy rules to drive organizations worldwide to begin minimizing the amount of information they collect and store on individuals in 2016, both to protect privacy as well as minimize the impact of data breaches.

Boards of directors that figure out how to leverage cybersecurity as a strategic asset will give their organizations a strong competitive advantage, says Lance Hayden of Berkeley Research Group. "Security needs to be part of what the organization uses to competitively differentiate itself."

In the coming months, the Department of Homeland Security will implement a new cyberthreat information sharing law designed to help prevent breaches. But will the Cybersecurity Act of 2015 really make a difference?

The breaches of the infidelity online dating service Ashley Madison and toymaker VTech illustrate how cyber intrusions got worse in 2015, thanks to organizations failing to secure private information.

Improving breach detection and defenses involves much more than buying the latest technology, warns security expert Haroon Meer. "We keep moving on as we try to solve new, shiny problems, which we then half solve, but we still haven't completely solved problems that we knew about 20 years ago."

NIST is soliciting comments from stakeholders on whether its cybersecurity framework is helping organizations secure their information systems. Those observations could result in an update of the framework, NIST's Adam Sedgewick explains in this interview.

Understanding the promise of user behavior analytics is one thing. Deploying them to detect and respond to threats is quite another. Bert Rankin of Fortscale offers tips on practical application of the latest UBA solutions.

Too many recent high-profile breaches resulted from attackers using legitimate user credentials to infiltrate critical systems. Fortscale's Bert Rankin tells how user behavior analytics help organizations catch attackers after the breach.

Conflicting cybersecurity guidance from banking regulators and a federal agency is making it more difficult for CISOs to set priorities, says Chris Feeney, president of BITS, the technology and policy division of the Financial Services Roundtable.

To help train more cybersecurity professionals, academia must work with business and government to find enough qualified trainers and educators, says George Washington University Professor Diana Burley.