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TechFortune Crystal Ball

Prediction: Cyberspies Will Attack Your Inbox in 2016

Robert Hackett
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Robert Hackett
Robert Hackett
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Robert Hackett
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Robert Hackett
Robert Hackett
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November 30, 2015, 10:00 AM ET
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Hacker, cyborg programmer on a computerPhotograph by Getty Images/iStockphoto
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The staff of Fortune recently assembled its predictions for 2016. Here’s one of our forecasts.

Your credit card information is probably already for sale on the black market, sad to say. But odds are you’ll be hacked in a more insidious way in 2016, sadder to say. Your identity has by now been logged into some vast spy database in a foreign country (probably China), where an intelligence agency is building up a profile around your persona—sourced from personal information available on social media and through breached health insurers, airlines, government offices, and the like. That means these state-sponsored attackers have everything they need to target you with crafty phishing schemes to help them compromise your networks, your data, your contacts. So think twice before opening that next email attachment.

This article is part of the 2016 Fortune Crystal Ball, a package of 33 predictions about business, politics and the economy by the writers and editors of Fortune. To see the entire package, click here.

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