"In the future, I believe we will see more cyber operations that will change or manipulate electronic information to compromise its integrity…instead of deleting it or disrupting access to it," Clapper said at a Bipartisan Policy Center conference on cybersecurity.
Clapper, whose office is in charge of annual worldwide threat updates, has placed cybersecurity at the top of the list of threats to US national security interests for the past four years.
The intelligence community estimates that the number of endpoints, with potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities, is likely to reach 29.5 billion by 2020. Technology industry research has estimated there will be tens of billions of devices connected to the Internet over the next four to five years.