Media Coverage

One such ransomware gang is the group behind the Crysis ransomware, who's been recently using RDP brute-force attacks to infect large organizations. In the past six months, this group's activity has more than doubled, according to security firm Trend Micro.

Evil hackers with monomaniacal intentions of a globe-disrupting nature have long dominated pop culture sensibilities. But when it comes to for-profit hacking, it's important to remember that cybercrime has been, and remains, predominantly a business-driven concern, says Eduardo Cabrera, chief cybersecurity officer of endpoint security vendor Trend Micro.

According to Trend Micro, most of the attacks are targeting the healthcare sector in the United States, though other industries were hit hard as well.

A recent Trend Micro report revealed that attacks on business emails and business processes will continue to grow in 2017 because they’re cheap and simple forms of corporate extortion.

“Apps may request admin­istrative privileges to your data, and those privileges could be used by the app later on, or by some malware, to steal your personal information,” says Ed Cabrera, chief cybersecurity officer at TrendMicro, a digital security company.

For example, the price of a customizable Crypto Locker executable file is around $50 according to research done by Trend Micro, on top of that, ransomware operators tend to take a 10% cut of the profits made from targets.

Jon Clay, director of Global Threat Communications at Trend Micro, says corporate IT "needs to have visibility into what is occurring within the office—and that can be challenging in the main network, let alone a remote location."

Cabrera, who served 20 years in the United States Secret Service, with a stint as its CISO, and racked up experience leading information security, cyber investigative, and protective programs in support of the Secret Service integrated missions before moving to the private sector, says local skimming operations that physically compromise credit card and financial accounts have been overtaken and outdone by international cybercrimes where attacks on endpoints, networks and cloud

Trend Micro said it validated Shames' identity thanks to his inadvertently using his real name in a series of Hack Forums posts in January 2012 while logged into the Mephobia account.

Trend Micro noted a sharp increase in the number of unique Android malware samples targeted at mobile users—from 10.7 million samples in 2015 to more than 19.2 million in December 2016.