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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.