DirectTrust is beta testing a new version of its Direct protocol for secure email messaging that can support secure texting and "chats" involving health information on mobile devices, says David Kibbe, M.D., the association's president and CEO.

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.

Lucia Savage, chief privacy officer at ONC, explains how a new "interoperability pledge" taken by dozens of large electronic health record vendors and healthcare organizations will advance secure health data exchange as well as help patients to securely share their own health information.

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.

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.

Cybersecurity competitions are being adapted so employers can use them to vet the know-how of prospective employees, U.S. Cyber Challenge National Director Karen Evans says.

It used to be that security was the one big barrier to organizations embracing the cloud. But Troy Kitch of Oracle says that not only is that barrier coming down, but now leaders are seeing cloud as a security enabler.