Dec 22, 2016 10:23 AM EST By Chris Brandt, UniversityHerald Reporter

With the controversy of the Russians hacking into computers and manipulating the election results, more and more people are worried about online safety and cybersecurity. The most common question that pervades the thoughts is if it could happen to the government, how much more to the private citizens who have no way how to protect themselves against such attacks. What should we expect in 2017 when it comes to these issues?

David Higgins, ANZ Regional Director of WatchGuard Technologies, said that these attacks will escalate next year. He added that cybercriminals will use even more sophisticated tools to do their dirty deeds. He cited the statistics between 2015 and 2016 saying that during the first half of 2016, there was a 172 percent surge in ransomware compared to the entirety of 2015. Acoording to the FBI, cybercriminals have used ransomware to steal more than $200 million from businesses in America alone.

Aside from ransomware, cybercriminals will also exploit the cloud. Since most organizations and businesses are already adopting the use of cloud, criminals will also bring their game into this level and leverage it as a potential attack surface as well as a launchpad for their attacks. Thus, it won't be surprising to see that one of the headline grabbing incidents next year will be related to cyberattacks.

Next year, hackers will also launch more DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks by targeting IoT source codes, the way they did to the Mirai IoT attack this year. One of the reasons why IoT becomes a target comes from the fact that there is a huge volume of devices that are fully dependent on the Internet. Because of this, these devices are filled with vulnerabilities which look tempting to hackers.

Cyber war will get uglier next year as hackers become more sophisticated in their methodologies. Because of this, a lot of civilian casualties will also pile up.

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