Once it had put a stop to any other miners, the bot checked whether its own Monero miner was operating. If not, it downloaded the files again and restarted the process, once more checking for other miners. This design meant that Outlaw could expand its reach significantly by taking over from competitors. One of the latest developments from the group behind MyKingz was to use steganography to hide a malicious script inside a picture of Taylor Swift. This helped it to slip past enterprise networks, which would just see a seemingly harmless JPEG, rather than the dangerous EXE.
Cryptojacking: The Rising Threat to Networks
As cryptomining becomes more resource-intensive and time-consuming, profitable mining increasingly depends on high computing capacities and expensive power consumption. Illegal mining in the form of cryptojacking aims to use other people’s computing resources to generate profits without incurring any of their own operating costs. To this end, affected systems are often added to mining botnets that act as illegal mining pools and bundle computing power. Once What is cryptojacking the hackers have found their way into devices or cloud services, when a user clicks a link that has seemingly no action, the cryptomining code is installed onto the device’s backend. A cryptojacking attack may also be referred to as malicious cryptomining, as hackers gain access to devices through rogue apps and browser downloads. Virtually all kinds of devices can be compromised, from desktop PCs and laptops to smartphones and even network servers.
Cryptojacking is the new ransomware
Instead of acquiring their own devices and paying the high electricity costs, they use malware to compromise unsuspecting user devices to secretly seize computational power. Cybercriminals are always modifying code and coming up with new delivery methods to embed updated scripts onto your computer system. Being proactive and staying on top of the latest trends can help you detect cryptojacking on your network and devices. Each time a hacker adds a new block to the chain they receive cryptocurrency coins. Without very little work or risk, these threat actors are able to gain reward in cryptocurrency that they can anonymously put directly into their digital wallets. Here’s what you need to know about cryptojacking, how it affects your online security and how to protect your business and personal computers to prevent them from being used for malicious intent.
What is play to earn? How to make money with NFT games
Despite these moves, Talos described the threat actor as having “poor operational security”, leaving behind many mistakes that allowed the researchers to connect the dots and build up a profile on it. It was relatively simple to hack vulnerable sites and insert the Coinhive script onto them, with any Monero mined by the site’s visitors going straight to the wallets of the attackers. Many site owners didn’t have a clue that their website was cryptojacking visitors. This is generally just normal cryptomining software that has been altered to run quietly in the background. For established cryptocurrencies, mining is generally done on an industrial scale with ASIC and FPGA machines – these are essentially finely tuned computers that are effective at mining cryptocurrency. Since mining is so energy-intensive, it is mainly done in countries with cheap electricity, such as China, Iceland, or Venezuela.
- Unable to achieve this, Nakamoto instead developed a digital cash system that was based on the accuracy and transparency of accounts, balances, and recording of transactions to prevent double-spending.
- After being executed, the cryptomining script runs in background, without the knowledge of the user.
- While individual phones have relatively limited processing power, when attacks occur in large numbers, they provide enough collective strength to justify the cryptojackers’ efforts.
- Given the financial incentives, it’s easy to question just how motivated the company was to change the practice.
- An email will show a link that will, upon clicking, infect the device with cryptomining code.
However, anonymised altcoins such as Monero and Ethereum, offer criminals the necessary anonymity for illegal transactions via hijacked systems. Cryptojacking is a form of cyberattack that uses javascript to secretly use a computer’s processing power to mine cryptocurrencies. As cryptocurrency is all the rage these days, cryptojacking is also becoming more common. According to a report by ReasonLabs, in the last year 58.4% of all Trojans detected were cryptojacking coin miners. Meantime, another study by SonicWall found that 2021 was the worst year to date for cryptojacking attacks, with the category logging 97.1 million attacks over the course of the year.