The financial impact of ransomware rose by 60% in 2018, losses from business email compromise (BEC) doubled, cryptojacking incidents - the unauthorised use of others’ computing resources to conduct cryptomining - more than tripled, and there continued to be a steady stream of high-profile data breaches, according to a report from the Internet Society’s Online Trust Alliance.

A bog standard attack aimed at planting a cryptocurrency miner has been found to be using advanced targeted attack tools as well, the security firm Trend Micro says, pointing out that this behaviour marks a departure from the norm.

The fall in the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has led to a fall in the planting of cryptomining scripts by Windows malware in the third quarter of this year generally, but not in Australia and New Zealand.