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The two organizations that conducted the research are both based

Dec. 22, 2017 by Lena Webb

The two organizations that conducted the research are both based in San Francisco, in California.

That the cybercriminals are using Trickbot's ransomware to target smaller organizations was not surprising, given the fact that Trickbot's attack is not an uncommon and relatively new infection that has also been reported by various independent experts. The same was true of CrowdStrike, which conducted the same analysis in early August. While both researchers have noted the presence of similar cybercriminals in many of the smaller organizations, they both said that the most successful attack that was found was by one of them.

"The fact that the attack is so common and is so fast and so easy to detect at this time, makes it a very difficult task to detect the larger groups of organizations, but it's a lot harder to prevent those groups from spreading than to infect an entire large organization, if it's really such a common threat," said Chris W. Schindler, professor of security at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the paper, published online Nov. 30 in the Journal of Security Research.

The researchers used a large, high-speed network test rig that the researchers said made it possible for them to measure how quickly they could quickly detect the target. The test rig also detected that Trickbot's malware targets relatively small, highly centralized organizations.

"I believe this is one of the most powerful and most efficient tools that can be used to detect or detect large groups of people in a large organization," Schindler said. "It really helps us to make sure that we don't have to do all that work, and that we've been able to protect our own networks in order to prevent our own organizations from spreading."

The researchers said Trickbot is capable of taking thousands of hours to download and deploy from a single computer, making it one of the most sophisticated attack vectors that they've ever encountered in a threat to their systems.