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The hacker in question was the supremely talented Manfred Paul who pulled off the lightning-fast double exploit using two critical vulnerabilities at the PWN2OWN Vancouver, 2022, event that came to an end on Friday, May 20.

Dustin Childs, the communications manager of Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative, which hosts the contest, told Insider he had expected to see "bug collisions," or two researchers finding the same flaw, but was surprised to find everything "was a unique exploit."

In its 15th anniversary year, the elite hacking event created by the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) pays big bounties to those who reveal zero-days impacting the most prominent of vendors.

TrendMicro discovered that AvosLocker ransomware actors recently used a PowerShell script to disable antivirus software and evade detection.

Hive ransomware, first observed in June 2021, has already “made its mark as one of the most prolific and aggressive ransomware families today,” according to Trend Micro Inc.

"Similar to Joker, another piece of mobile malware, Facestealer changes its code frequently, thus spawning many variants," Trend Micro analysts Cifer Fang, Ford Quin, and Zhengyu Dong said in a new report. "Since its discovery, the spyware has continuously beleaguered Google Play."

Eva Chen is the Co-founder and CEO of Trend Micro, one of the world’s largest security firms. In 2012, she made Forbe’s list of ‘Asia’s 50 Power Businesswomen’.

ESET data from 2020 suggests WannaCry accounted for as much as 40.5% of all ransomware detections globally and, in 2021, WannaCry was the only ransomware to make Trend Micro’s list of top ten most-used malware strains of the year – coming fourth.

While the software giant classified the attack complexity as "high," it also noted that the vuln is under active attack. So "someone must have figured out how to make that happen," wrote Trend Micro's Dustin Childs on the Zero Day Initiative blog.

"The framework is distributed via a pay-per-install (PPI) service and contains multiple parts, including a loader, a dropper, a protection driver, and a full-featured remote access trojan (RAT) that implements its own network communication protocol," Trend Micro said in a report published Thursday.