Media Coverage

Uber, PayPal and even Netflix accounts have become much more valuable to criminals, as evidenced by the price these stolen identifiers now fetch on the so-called "Deep Web," according to security company Trend Micro.

Last week, security firm Trend Micro reported finding another piece of ransomware based on Hidden Tear. The threat, detected as Ransom_Cryptear.B, demanded 2,000 Brazilian reals ($500) from victims using a ransom note written in Portuguese.

Last week, security firm Trend Micro reported finding another piece of ransomware based on Hidden Tear. The threat, detected as Ransom_Cryptear.B, demanded 2,000 Brazilian reals ($500) from victims using a ransom note written in Portuguese.

The report, part of a series profiling criminal undergrounds in different countries, placed Brazilian cyber-criminals just behind those in Russia and China in terms of technical expertise. And, because of their focus on financial crimes, Brazilian cyber-criminals are second only to those from Russia in their ability to attack banks and other financial institutions, Tom Kellermann, chief cyber-security officer at Trend Micro, told eWEEK.

Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer at the security firm Trend Micro, is among the experts who don't anticipate a deterrent effect. "Realistically, this a model that is going to be copied," he says. "There has been an explosion in the last six months of extortion and ransomware. And the more notoriety they get for the takedown, the more copycats there will be."

Eva Chen has served as the CEO of Trend Micro for 11 years. She co-founded the company in 1988, and recently led Trend's $300 million acquisition of IPS vendor TippingPoint from HP. Trend Micro is now doubling down on security products and services for Internet of Things devices, including automobiles, and business and consumer IoT devices and gadgets.

Software will have bugs. And when several researchers start scrutinizing the same code, more bugs will be found. This is exactly what is happening with Mediaserver, as researchers uncover vulnerabilities that are "tangential" to each other, said Christopher Budd, a global threat communications manager at Trend Micro. They all exist in the same component, but are distinct issues.

To help assess whether the Fed system is at risk, I turned to IT security expert Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer at security provider Trend Micro. He says it's apparently possible that weaknesses in the STAR system could make other Fed systems vulnerable. "Watering hole attacks and integrity attacks are flourishing in the wild, and these pose the most severe threats to STAR," Kellermann says. And he sees as worrisome the IG's call for stronger controls to manage access,

"This is the first time we have proof and can tie malware to a particular outage," said Trend Micro senior researcher Kyle Wilhoit. "It is pretty scary."

A new Ursnif malware variant has been detected in the wild, and the U.S. and U.K. are being particularly targeted, according to Trend Micro researchers.