On the positive side, the security industry is making advances in several key areas that are helping keep companies better protected from cyber attacks.  The most notable of the advances we found in our research are: 

• The number of new POS malware variants decreased by 88 percent since 2015 
• SSL and TLS encrypted traffic increased 34 percent year-over-year 
• Major exploit kits Angler, Nuclear and Neutrino disappeared 
• Unique malware attack attempts dropped to 7.87 billion from 8.19 billion in 2015 

Yet despite these positive industry advances, the cyber war landscape saw some new challenges emerge.  The most notable of these we found in our research were:

• Ransomware  attacks grew 167x from 2014 to 2016 to an astounding 638 million attacks during the year 
• SSL/TLS encrypted malware was exploited 72 percent more often in 2016 than in 2015 
• Internet of Things (IoT) devices were compromised to launch record-setting  DDoS attacks 
• Despite significant  efforts by Google to patch vulnerabilities, Android continued to be exploited by cyber criminals