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Somewhat interestingly, the individual conducting the chat conversation did not appear to know the ransom amount that the victim was being asked to pay and appeared reliant on the honesty of the victim to provide that information. “That’s because they haven’t built a channel to upload data from the victim to the ‘call center,’” says Christopher Budd, global threat communications manager at Trend Micro.

“The benefit is the user doesn't get infected, so the likelihood that they won't report the issue to the website owner is higher than if malware was used to infect them,” Trend Micro Senior Global Marketing Manager Jon Clay told SCMagazine.com. “This allows their scam to run longer than normal.”

FastPOS doesn't care about this aspect, and Trend Micro says the malware sends any stolen data to the C&C server as soon as it can get its hands on it.

While analyzing the threat, researchers with security firm Trend Micro observed that it was designed to target Windows XP 64-bit computers and that it can also run on more recent versions of Windows such as Windows 7 and 8.

“Most targeted attacks take minutes or seconds for the initial compromise,” explains Ed Cabrera, VP of Cyber Security Strategy at Trend Micro. “But it takes months or years to detect them.”

Software security vendor Trend Micro is promoting a layered approach to defending against the increasing threat of ransomware and malware.

After TeslaCrypt's authors publicly released the ransomware's master decryption key last week, Trend Micro researchers spotted cyber crooks jumping to CryptXXX.

Trend Micro recommends a layered protection approach involving a combination of web/email gateway, endpoint, server and network security. The firm said it stopped a massive 99 million ransomware threats for its customers between October 2015 and April 2016 – although admitted the actual figure for real infections globally is likely to be many times this number.

"Mac OS X and iOS are platforms that Trend Micro's security researchers look at," Christopher Budd, global threat communications manager at Trend Micro, told eWEEK. "As far as our Zero Day Initiative soliciting vulnerabilities from researchers for Mac OS X and iOS for possible vulnerabilities, Mac OS is one of the platforms of focus for Pwn2Own 2016."

Although cybercriminals have been turning out specialized hacking and attack tools at a rapid pace, terrorists are often using legitimate, consumer-focused technologies, according to a new Trend Micro report.