Media Coverage

Over the last decade, the Zero Day Initiative's (ZDI) annual Pwn2Own competition has emerged to become one of the premiere events on the information security calendar and the 2017 edition does not look to be any different.

Trend Micro last week announced the availability of the latest Trend Micro TippingPoint NX Series Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention Systems (NGIPS).

Trend Micro has also analyzed the attacks and determined that the threat actor sent out the spear-phishing emails from compromised accounts, particularly ones belonging to attorneys and associates at various law firms.

"The $1 billion number isn't at all unreasonable and might even be low," confirmed Mark Nunnikhoven, vice president of cloud research at Trend Micro.

Ransomware is set to have another bumper year in 2017, although growth is likely to level out, according to Trend Micro.

The HiveSpot goes one step further than both the Orbi and the Velop however, by offering Ai Protection at no extra cost. This is a built-in network security suite powered by Trend Micro that detects and blocks online security threats. Basically the entire home network powered by the HiveSpot system is protected in real-time against online malware and cyber threats.

“Enterprises that have edge-of-network devices could find theirs utilized by hacktivists and other threat actors in launching DDoS attacks,” said Trend Micro Inc. Director of Global Threat Communications Jon Clay. “The Mirai botnet code has been made available publicly so anyone could utilize this to recruit new IoT devices that are not secured properly. Enterprises which have IoT devices should be sure to update any account credentials used by the devices as well as ensuring the devices are

A newly discovered family of malware targeting ATMs (automated teller machines) has been designed with the sole purpose of emptying cash from the safes of the self-serve machines, Trend Micro security researchers warn.

As per Trend Micro’s report, ransomware has almost doubled in the first half of 2016 with a 172% growth in comparison to the past year.

Since their founding in 1988, Trend Micro has innovated software solutions to protect the privacy of consumers and businesses on the web.

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.

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.

Christopher Budd, a global threat communications manager at Trend Micro notes that the latest research focused on adware, but scam apps downloaded from unaffiliated app stores put users at risk of being exposed to all sorts of malware. “The biggest thing is the importance of going only to the official app stores,” Budd says. “The mobile malware problem that we’ve seen is almost exclusively a problem with third-party locations.”

The Dropbox attack also is reminiscent of the LinkedIn breach of 2012, when an attack that originally was thought to have impacted 6.5 million users eventually was found to have exposed 117 million users, noted Christopher Budd, global threat communications manager at Trend Micro.

The figures on reactions to ransomware from Trend Micro come following a surge in cyberattacks using the file encrypting malicious software over the last year which has resulted in it becoming the largest threat to cybersecurity, as demonstrated by some cases of Locky infections against high-profile targets.

Trend Micro researchers have discovered a stealthy new rootkit family named after Pokemon character Umbreon which could allow hackers to remotely control targeted devices.

"I think we can safely say that it's a unanimous and universal concern that electoral systems are appropriately protected," said Christopher Budd, global threat communication manager at Trend Micro.

The IoT ransomware is possible because many IoT devices are based on the Android operating system. In July 2016, Trend Micro reported that an FLocker variant can now affect smart TVs.

The majority of ransomware discovered by Trend Micro came from spam emails. That accounted for 58 per cent of the ransomware discovered by the company. Another 40 per cent came from URLs hosting ransomware files.

Key features: Trend Micro Deep Security secures physical, virtual, cloud hybrid environments. It protects enterprises from ransomware, breaches and disruptions, simplifies security operations and accelerates regulatory compliance.

Jon Clay, a cybersecurity and threat expert for Trend Micro, says that utilizing multiple exploits in an attack is common for most platforms. But since relatively few vulnerabilities are found in iOS to begin with (compared to platforms like Windows) it would be unique to see an attack sequencing multiple exploits.

In fact, for the past four years—between 2012 and 2015, inclusive—hacking and malware have edged out missing devices as the top threat for financial institutions, according to anti-malware firm Trend Micro and research conducted by eWEEK using Privacy Rights Clearinghouse data.

Trend Micro offered insights on the first half of 2016.

It might seem like an odd question as you can probably point out the physical building or buildings that house your data center(s). But does that physical installation line up with the logic concept of the “data center” held by your business?

Whoever is distributing - or helping to distribute - Locky recently began using Windows Script Files to download the ransomware onto victims' PCs, researchers at security firm Trend Micro say in a blog post. The new variant, first seen in the wild on July 15, is being sold on underground Brazilian cybercrime sites, the researchers say.

“Such a technique allows this threat to bypass security measures, including sandbox analysis, since it has no static file type. In addition, using blended scripting languages could result to the samples being encoded, making these arduous to analyze,” Trend Micro researchers said in a blog post.

A new variant of Locky ransomware using Windows Scripting Files (WSF) as a downloader, Trend Micro researchers observed.

Trend Micro reported in April that ATM malware is on the rise. Recent attacks have shown with a combination of hacking and large teams, ATM operators, banks, and account holders are collectively getting slammed with millions of dollars in losses over the course of just a few hours.

Bank card readers and ATMs are yet another vulnerability, IT security firm Trend Micro has warned.

This is the first time when the use of steganography has been observed in a malvertising attack, according to Proofpoint. The company's researchers worked with researchers from Trend Micro to deconstruct the attackers' technique and analyze it.

Trend Micro researchers spotted a new ransomware as a service (RaaS), dubbed Stampado, which may be indicative of ransomware market trends.

The scale of the ransomware problem is still unclear, although Trend Micro claims to have blocked in excess of 100 million threats for its customers around the world in just the past six months alone.