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.

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.

This could be a record year for HIPAA enforcement actions by federal regulators, both in the number of resolution agreements and in the size of financial settlements resulting from breach investigations, predicts privacy attorney Adam Greene.

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.

The HHS Office for Civil Rights is making progress toward launching the long awaited next round of HIPAA compliance audits, which will consist mostly of desk audits. In a critical step, it plans to release its proposed new audit protocol in April, says Deven McGraw, OCR's deputy director of health information privacy.

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.

Debit fraud losses in Canada hit an all-time low in 2015, mainly because of the nearly complete migration to EMV and real-time settlement of debit payments, says Mark Sullivan, who heads fraud management for Interac, Canada's payment network. He offers important lessons for the U.S.

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.

The Department of Homeland security sees malware provenance - which identifies the attributes of malicious codes - as a way to complement its signature-based Einstein intrusion detection and prevention systems to find malware that infects IT systems.