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Kyle Wilhoit, who investigates these types of hacks for Trend Micro, said criminal hackers sometimes gain access to sensitive machinery by mistake.

If you’re curious about the teams and their attacks, security firm Trend Micro has recaps available for both days:

Security researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro recently detected an attack against companies from 18 countries where key employees were targeted with emails that contained a commercial keylogger program called Olympic Vision.

On Sunday and Monday, the Times, the BBC, AOL and a host of other major news and entertainment websites inadvertently ran malicious ads that attempted to hijack the computers of visitors and demand a ransom, according to security researchers Malwarebytes and Trend Micro.

The malicious advertisements are connected to servers hosting the Angler exploit kit, a software package that probes a computer for software vulnerabilities in order to deliver malware, Trend Micro said.

On Monday, Trend Micro researchers said in a blog post that Pawn Storm, well-known for spying upon political targets across the world, is now targeting several government offices -- including the Prime Minister's office and the Turkish parliament -- as well as one of the largest media publications in the country.

On Tuesday, Trend Micro researchers released a whitepaper documenting the results of an investigation into the Web's underbelly, asking if the underground is connected globally, or whether there are countries which have a certain illegal "specialization" in goods or services.

"Over the years, Windows has become a harder target to attack, and less and less of what's connected to the Internet runs Windows," said Christopher Budd, global threat communications manager at Trend Micro.

Trend Micro has been instrumental in bringing down several hostile cyber operations, including, with U.K. partner The National Crime Agency, Refud.me and Cryptex Reborn. Working with Interpol, Kaspersky Lab, Microsoft and the Cyber Defense Institute, the SIMDA botnet was also eliminated.

Researchers at Trend Micro, one of the world's biggest security software firms, said this week that the software used to infect the Ukrainian utilities has also been found in the networks of a large Ukrainian mining company and a rail company.

Four third-party app stores for Android have apps with a malicious component that seeks root access to devices, according to Trend Micro.

It’s the model that Christopher Budd suggests that companies use when thinking about the threats they face. Budd, a global threat communications manager with Trend Micro, has called this a natural evolution. As there’s more money to be made, criminals will get increasingly sophisticated in how to make it.

It's the ultimate challenge for government agencies: How can they be both secure and compliant - especially when operating in a hybrid cloud environment? Trend Micro's Ed Cabrera offers insight into the unique challenges and emerging solutions.

Paul Ferguson, threat research advisor at Trend Micro, told SCMagazine.com that he largely agreedwith the report's premise. “The technology behind a lot of new and emerging services are not built around privacy or security, so it leaves a lot of wiggle room for an adversary to get access to sensitive information, whether that is browsing history, cell phone call detail records, ISP logs, etc.,” said Ferguson. In this instance, the adversary would be a domestic intelligence

But Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro, says some data in the study may be a bit skewed since it doesn't appear to include data from hackers in Russia, Brazil, and China, for example.

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.