A newly discovered form of ransomware is targeting organisations with tailored phishing emails, demanding a huge ransom from unfortunate victims. The ransomware has been dubbed ‘Defray’ by researchers at Proofpoint who uncovered it. The name is based on that of the command-and-control server host-name in the first observed attack — ‘defrayable-listings’. It’s an appropriate name for this new ransomware strain, because to ‘defray’ means to provide money to pay a cost or expense, and the malware demands $5,000 to be paid in Bitcoin in exchange for decrypting the files. This is a much higher fee than is charged by most forms of ransomware.