McAfee has published its latest threat report, which shows a significant increase in malware related to cryptocurrency mining.
McAfee Labs’ September threat report found that cryptomining malware – malware that uses your computer to mine cryptocurrencies for someone else – nearly doubled in the past three months, an 85% increase. In total, 2.5 million new samples were found, and McAfee said some of the older malware was modified, changing its “path” to crypto mining.
However, this should not seem strange to us as we know that this type of malware is "blooming" at the moment. Hackers are trying to spread their malicious programs in any possible way they can, even to devices that will not benefit them much, such as IoT devices.
McAfee’s research also showed that malware designed to exploit existing vulnerabilities saw a 151% increase, with a large portion of these being variants of WannaCry and NotPetya. “Wannacry and NotPetya are two prime examples of malware/ransomware, capable of infecting systems through known vulnerabilities. It’s amazing that even today, hackers can spread their malicious programs using known security holes that haven’t been patched since 2014, or device/program administrators haven’t applied the necessary updates.”
As for ransomware, they have also recorded a significant increase of 57% over the course of a year.
Finally, we are sure that at least some of the malware exploits security vulnerabilities that have not yet been published, but this is certainly a small percentage of the total.
