[ad_1]
NEW DELHI: The boom in the value of cryptocurrencies over the past quarter is causing crybercriminals to sit back. After a year or more of decline, the number of malware miners fell from 187,746 in January to 200,045 in March, according to a report by security firm Kaspersky.
Miners are special types of malware designed to covertly use a computer’s resources to mine cryptocurrency. Hackers can siphon up to 70-80% of a computer’s power and use it to mine for cryptocurrency.
As a result, a device can slow down, heat up, and even catch fire at times. Scams that install malware like this are also known as cryptojacking.
Vulnerabilities exploited by minors can also be used to steal data from devices. Today, threat actors are running cryptojacking processes in the background at low thresholds to avoid being alerted, or even to cover up more serious attacks. At the end of last year, Microsoft released a report indicating that malicious actors face attacks with cryptojacking scripts as a lure of larger attacks, such as credential theft, ”said Rahul. Tyagi, co-founder of Safe Security.
According to Kaspersky, a total of 432,171 unique users encountered minors in the first quarter of 2021, and the number of unique changes made to minors has more than quadrupled from 3,815 to 16,934. Unique changes are changes to a miner code to accommodate different currencies or devices.
Cryptojacking scams were common in 2017-18, but have declined over the past two years. Crypto mining, which is the process that creates new cryptocurrencies on the blockchain, depends on the amount of computing power.
With the emergence of mining farms around the world, which can generate computing power worth a thousand computers, cryptojacking scams could only be successful if they infect thousands of devices.
It is too early to say for sure if the trend we saw in Q12021 is here to stay. However, it appears that the rise in the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has sparked renewed interest in miners, ”said Evgeny Lopatin, security expert at Kaspersky. If the crypto markets remain strong this year, it is likely that we will continue to see more examples of users encountering minors, ”he added.
Cryptominers accounted for 41% of all malware detected in 2020, according to the 2021 Global Threat Intelligence Report by Japanese technology service provider NTT. The most common variant was a malware called XMRig, which uses infected devices to mine a crypto called Monero.
According to the analysis of our threat intelligence teams, organized cybercriminal gangs are increasingly focusing on consumers when it comes to cryptojacking attacks. This is largely because of the lack of consumer awareness in tracking such attacks, ”Tyagi said.
Subscribe to mint newsletters
* Enter a valid email
* Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter.
Never miss a story! Stay connected and informed with Mint. Download our app now !!
The subjects
[ad_2]
picture credit