Bangalore, December 27 2016: This is the time of year when  technology pundits put on their thinking caps, look into crystal balls, pull out their Tarot cards  and do whatever it takes to try and second-guess the trends of the year ahead. For Net security companies this  is so often a doom-and-gloom story.  With each  passing year, as their own preventive solutions are refined, the bad guys are just a megabyte behind trying to penetrate freshly elected firewalls.
Nor do they always concur.  Like the Blind Men of Hindustan,  all groping the elephant in the famous  Victorian-era poem of  John Godfrey Saxe and coming to different conclusions, "each in his own opinion, exceeding stiff and strong,...was partly in the right."
We don't claim any special wisdom;  so, to provide our readers the most complete  picture of the cyber  threat scenario in 2017,  we compiled the key findings of three leaders.  We have already sharedFortinet's predictions.  Here is the 2nd:
Global cybersecurity leader Forcepoint in its  2017 Cybersecurity Predictions Report. examines the increasing convergence of the technological and the physical worlds and the long term implications of this new digital ecosystem on organizations and institutions worldwide. Some of this year’s predictions:

• Voice-First Artificial Intelligence (AI) Platforms and Command Sharing: The rise of voice-activated AI to access Web, data and apps will open up creative new attack vectors and data privacy concerns.

• The Cloud as an Expanding Attack Vector – “The Challenge to Securing Cloud Infrastructure”  Organizations migrating their already vulnerable environments to the cloud will find limited security benefits without proper preparation as the underlying foundation that runs virtual machines may be increasingly come under attack.

• Connected cars will be taken for ransom. As cars start to have connected capabilities, it is only a matter of time until we see an automobile hack on a large scale. This could include cars being held for ransom, self-driving cars being hacked to obtain their location for hijacking, unauthorized surveillance and intelligence gathering, or other automobile-focused threats. This will also lead to a question of liability between the software vendor and automobile manufacturer, which will have long-term implications on the future of connected cars.