Media Coverage

On Thursday, Europol announced that security vendors Bitdefender, Check Point, Emsisoft, and Trend Micro have joined the project as associated partners.

Security software company Trend Micro says cyber-attacks on enterprise networks and the internet of things will only grow in volume and sophistication in 2017.

Ed Cabrera, chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro, said things have become markedly worse since that report. He said at the end of September, the increase was 400 percent. “In 2015, there had been 29 families observed, and as of September, we have observed and blocked 145 families,” he said.

Many other transportation networks are likely be vulnerable the same sort of attack, since the ransomware used attacks Microsoft Windows-based computers with outdated software, said Ed Cabrera, chief cybersecurity officer at TrendMicro.

“I haven’t seen another ransomware attack against another transportation entity,” said Ed Cabrera, chief cybersecurity officer with antivirus vendor Trend Micro Inc.

Investigators say a small corps of elite hacking groups is carrying out the attacks. “The skill level to create the malware for the actual network intrusions is a step up,” from more common ATM crimes, said Robert McArdle, a security researcher with antivirus vendorTrend Micro Inc.

EDR, meanwhile, is now part of the product lines of traditional AV companies such as McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro. "EDR is rapidly becoming a feature" in most new endpoint security products, Gartner's Firstbrook says.

According to Trend Micro researchers, since the Adobe fix and the announcement of the Windows zero-day patch, the Pawn Storm attackers ramped up their spear-phishing campaigns against various governments and embassies around the world, seeking to maximize the utility of the soon-to-be patched Windows zero-day.

The Flash Player security updates fix nine critical vulnerabilities that could be exploited remotely to execute malicious code on computers. All of them were privately reported by researchers through Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative, an exploit acquisition program.

Jon Clay, director of global threat communications for Trend Micro, an internet security firm, said Apple’s tight control over the iPhone had historically kept malicious apps out of its App Store. Fake apps appeared more often on Google’s Android platform or on third-party app stores, he said.