Cryptojacking – the malicious practice of hijacking a computer's resources to mine cryptocurrencies – has increased at a rapid pace since late last year.
As we reported in an earlier article, according to a Symantec report published on Wednesday, Cryptojacking has increased by 8,500% in the past year, especially since September – around the same time that the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum hit really high levels.
In addition to being lucrative, Cryptojacking is generally simpler than installing malware on someone's computer and often goes unnoticed by the victim.
“Cybercriminals use coinminers to steal the processing power of victims’ computers and use the CPU to mine cryptocurrency,” the report says. “The barrier to entry for digital coin mining is quite low. It potentially requires only a few lines of code to operate—and coin mining can allow criminals to go undetected in a way that is not possible for other types of cybercrime.”.
While it's not necessarily as destructive as malware, it doesn't mean it's harmless. It can cause computers to overheat, which can in turn cause device malfunctions. For organizations, it can cause all sorts of problems, including significant financial costs if the organization is billed based on CPU usage, the report says.
We've seen cryptomining pop up everywhere in the past year, from websites to Chrome extensions to even apps in Apple's Mac App Store. Symantec reports that it discovered 1.7 million miners on computers in December, which gives us an idea of how widespread the practice is.
On the other hand, ransomware – a type of malware often associated with cryptocurrency – has declined in 2017, both in terms of new ransomware detections and recent ransom demands. However, as seen in the example of NotPetya, the devastating malware that hit banks and other critical infrastructure in 2017 – ransomware is often used for threat or as a disruption tool, rather than purely for profit.
