“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future,” as Nils Bohr, the Nobel laureate physicist put it. But as the end of 2016 approaches, it’s useful to look forward and try to anticipate the cybersecurity trends that lie ahead; and to reflect on what’s happened over the past year, to see how accurate previous predictions were. For 2016, our predicted security threats were:

• The emergence of sophisticated and custom-designed malware designed to get past organizations’ defences. Attackers are using bespoke variants of existing malware, which can bypass traditional antivirus and sandboxing tools – our 2016 Security Report revealed that 971 unknown malware variants were downloaded to enterprise networks every hour.

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