2017 Will See Emboldened Hackers

In 2016, hackers were at the center of two remarkable events: the assertion that Russian cyber-operatives influenced the U.S. election, and the revelation that cybercriminals accessed more than a billion Yahoo accounts. “The fact that we may never have definitive answers suggests that 2017 will be just as digitally perilous for most people as last year,” the Los Angeles Times reports. That includes businesses, which are still struggling to keep up with the spread of ransomware. For firms looking to protect themselves, “Using encryption would be a big improvement,” James Andrew Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, told the Times. “Big companies should be encrypting data.”