Cyber criminals will create roughly 100 million new malware variants over the next 12 months. Security vendors will respond with new malware signatures and behaviors to stop them, but thousands of companies will be victimized in the process, experiencing costly or catastrophic breaches. This isn’t new - it’s a cycle.

A government agency that found itself infected with ransomware and having to pay the ransom to restore service. Another local agency has opted not to pay the ransom and restore operations. Ransomware targeted at organizations is still a threat and even with backups, you have a highly disruptive and public event to try to get back online that comes with serious costs and potentially lost revenue.

An extremely sophisticated IoT botnet has recently been discovered and dubbed “Torii.” One of Torii malware’s many advanced capabilities is running on just about every type of smartphone, computer and tablet, with over 100 malware variants supporting over 15 different architectures.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on Capitol Hill in Washington on Dec. 19, 2017. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Several new malware families have made recent appearances on the Bambenek Consulting feeds and are now tracked also by ThreatSTOP. These malware families are different in action and in their targets.

Nao_sec provides cyber security research dedicated to Exploit Kits. In campaigns that include Exploit Kits, landing pages with malicious code are used in an attempt to exploit a specific vulnerability on the victim's device.

Certain versions of Xshell contain a backdoor that could allow for data exfiltration.

Point of Sale (POS) malware is a growing field of concern for the retail industry. From the large scale attack on Target in 2014 to smaller attacks that are going unreported. POS malware is an evolving field of study for security researchers.