Major healthcare breaches involving hackers accessing patient information soared in 2016. But now more cybercriminals are shifting their attention to ransomware attacks because of the glut of stolen health information hitting the black market, says Dan Berger of CynergisTek.

As more IoT devices are compromised to wage large-scale attacks, related litigation and regulatory scrutiny will grow, which means device manufacturers - and users - could be held more accountable, says Richard Henderson, global security strategist at Absolute.

Increasing regulatory oversight is overwhelming smaller banks and credit unions, pushing them to continue to focus more on compliance than overall cybersecurity and resilience, says Sean Feeney, CEO of Defense Storm.

Staying current in threat detection is key, which is why more security companies need to embrace a more open way of thinking when it comes to solutions integration, says Christopher Kruegel, CEO of Lastline.

A pending federal regulation - called for under the HITECH Act - that would allow regulators to share with breach victims money collected in HIPAA violation cases eventually could have implications for class-action breach lawsuits, says privacy attorney Adam Greene.

Because most malware is spread via phishing, experts at Webroot are focusing their attention on stopping phishing attacks before they have a chance to infect a system with malicious code, says David Dufour, the company's senior director of engineering and cybersecurity.

Risk analysis is at the core of most card fraud prevention platforms used today, says Carol Alexander of CA Technologies. But what if the industry could take the lessons it's learned to other channels, enabling banking institutions to more readily identify potentially fraudulent transactions before they happen?

The honeymoon period for smaller players in cybersecurity is nearing an end, predicts Trend Micro CTO Raimund Genes. Achieving profitability has proven to be challenging for startups, while more established companies are thriving, he contends.

By applying analytics to user behavior, organizations can better prioritize the actual risks facing their business, thus helping cut through the sheer volume of security alerts they face daily, says Doug Copley, deputy CISO of Forcepoint.

Attackers continue to target enterprise assets both from outside and - too often - inside the corporate perimeter. To help, more organizations are turning to software-defined secure networks, says Mihir Maniar of Juniper Networks.