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However, this decline is not necessarily a positive indicator, according to Christopher Budd, threat communications manager with Trend Micro, the global cloud security company that issued the report, "Follow the Data: Dissecting Data Breaches and Debunking Myths."

"The security landscape is very fragmented and very discombobulated with regard to encryption," said Paul Ferguson, a threat research advisor at Trend Micro. "There doesn't seem to be a lot of coherency, to the point where end users are confused and don't know how to properly protect themselves."

Data stolen from the targets might also have been shared with others in Russia, if that is where the hacker is working, for his own protection, said Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer for Trend Micro Inc. "This is not over," Kellermann said. "The real question now is how many backdoors are still in these systems that have yet to be detected."

"This iteration of ransomware targeting Linux servers is an escalation," said Paul Ferguson, a senior threat research advisor at Trend Micro.

The media processing layer is prone to vulnerabilities and attacks, said Trend Micro’s Christopher Budd. The operating system takes the data from Web services and executes it as a lower-level process, and handling the shift correctly can be tricky. It is easy to introduce mistakes in this layer.