As shown by recent high-profile hacking scandals - targeting everyone from Sony Entertainment to the extramarital-affair-facilitating website Ashley Madison - cyber crime shows no sign of disappearing any time soon. In fact, experts predict that 2016 is going to be an even busier year for cyber criminals, hackers and scammers.

Something known as “state-sponsored cyber attacks” may not be something you have heard of until now. But with both Facebook and Google viewing the problem as serious enough to warn their users about, it seems this is an issue that could be here to stay.

It’s safe to say that malware attacks, phishing scams, and social media engineering practices are going nowhere fast. That means that, whether you are a home user or the owner or manager of a small or medium-sized business, if you choose to ignore safer online security practices you are putting your identity and the security of your company at serious risk.

Recently corporations have been targeted by scammers posing as executives or employees in order to initiate unauthorized international wire transfers. The so-called “spoofers” simply create a valid sounding email domain name and con businesses into sending money. According to the FBI, “CEO fraud”, “spoofing” and “business email compromise” has taken nearly $750 million in comparable scams from nearly 7,000 companies in the U.S. between October 2013 and August 2015.