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Detecting Mobile-Targeting Ransomware (Thursday, 10:00): Only 10 ransomware families currently target mobile devices, say researchers Federico Maggi of Trend Micro and Stefano Zanero of Politecnico di Milano. They promise to detail new techniques for how related attack code can be spotted.

Stephen Hilt, Trend Micro's lead researcher on the project, said they don’t have a concrete percentage on the number of encrypted messages. "However, there were very few pages that were actually encrypted," he said.

Security giant Trend Micro has launched XGen, a new approach to endpoint security blending multiple layers of threat protection, in a bid to head off what it claims are the over-hyped claims of rivals with narrower feature sets.

Called XGen endpoint security and available immediately, the new architecture reflects a security landscape in which increasingly sophisticated exploits arrive far too fast and often for any one form of protection to handle, according to Kevin Simzer (pictured), Trend Micro’s executive vice president of sales and marketing.

Ransomware often distributed via spam emails, especially now that the notorious Angler Exploit Kit (EK) is gone, and Locky appears responsible for a surge of certain delivery methods, researchers say. According to Trend Micro, 71% of known ransomware families arrive via email.

If an individual jumps through the various hoops necessary to access this part of the Internet, they can buy anything from weaponry to counterfeit documents and data dumps -- and stealing a person's identity is cheap, with Trend Micro estimating that each data record is worth less than a dollar in underground marketplaces.

The cloud is rapidly opening new IT delivery options for a wide range of organizations. “It’s an amplifier,” says Mark Nunnikhoven, vice president of cloud research for security solutions provider Trend Micro. “This is really exciting, as it lets organizations focus on their core business.”

Analyses, by both Morphus Labs and Trend Micro, show that the ransomware arrives at its destination either as an executable, downloaded from malicious sites, or as a file, dropped by another malware.

Google announced the Project Zero Prize a week after security vendor Trend Micro spelled out Mobile Pwn2Own 2016, a more traditional hacking contest that will run Oct. 26 and Oct. 27 in Tokyo.

"You need the right mediums for the right people. You can't have a one-size-fits-all training programme; if you're training your developers, you're going to need different content to what you're using to train your sales people, finance or HR people," says Rik Ferguson, VP of security research at Trend Micro, who stresses the importance of making cybersecurity training interesting, something many companies aren't doing.