Last year, ransomware stories dominated most headlines in the world which included damages done by Wanna Cry and Petya attacks to many individuals and organisations.
With new variants coming up every day, malware have become fast, brutal, and instantly disruptive. Advanced cyber criminals are now focused on crypto currencies, they covertly infect users’ computers with software to do the calculations needed to generate crypto currency i.e. digital money that uses cryptography to make secure online transactions without the need for banks e.g. Bitcoin, Monero and Ethereum; the crooks keep any cryptocoin proceeds for themselves. This process is referred to as crypto mining.
They do this because, to make any real money with coin mining, it requires massive amounts of computer processing power, which slows down performance and leaves wear and tear.
According to an article on crypto mining by Sophos, unlike other malwares, crypto miner don’t encrypt users files, they are able to access their data which makes crypto mining sound fair compared to ransomware. However, users’ computers will probably be annoyingly slow, the fans will be roaring all the time and their battery life will somehow run low.
These attacks might be serious on mobile devices since they affect battery life associated with continuous super-heavy processor usage which results in permanent damage.
Until recently, crypto mining wasn’t always a problem because the activity was largely limited to those who chose to do it.
That began to change as crypto currency prices skyrocketed. A single Bitcoin was worth $1000 at the start of 2017 and was valued at around $17,000 by year’s end. Cyber thieves have now taken notice and started using crypto miners to make money.
For instance, JavaScript miners like those from Coin hive are added to websites and run in the browser, using visitors’ CPUs to generate crypto currency. Users may notice poor performance, a spike in CPU usage and batteries draining faster than usual.
“Evolving malwares continuously force us to evolve our defenses to try closing all attack vectors by bad guys like crypto miners who take advantage of computing users and organizations”. Says Harish Chib, Vice President Middle East and Africa, Sophos.
They do this because, to make any real money with coin mining, one needs a lot of electricity to deliver a lot processing power on a lot of computers.
So they can either rent space in a giant coin mining server farms, for example in Iceland, where electricity is cheap and the weather is cold enough to cool computers from melting down or they are forced to steal other people’s electricity, processing power and air conditioning by using a malware to sneak crypto miners into their networks and browsers.
Legitimate crypto mining programs ask users for permission to run. Malicious versions don’t, opting instead to quietly leach a computer’s resources.
In other words, instead of showing up as executable files, they take the form of scripts hidden on websites, mining for crypto currency in the browser. Without permission, these miners tap into the victim’s CPU and use the processing power to mine for digital currency. Visitors to these sites see no evidence of the mining.
The only clues that something may be amiss are their computer slowing down and their fans revving up.
Malicious miners are most typically hidden on third-party web pages and in Android apps. Bitcoin has been the currency of choice for the bad guys, but Monero is becoming a lot more popular because it does not require as much processing power as it takes to dig for Bitcoin.
Ironically, a lot of coin mining software advises users not to bother running it on mobile phones: because the computing power of your mobile devices isn’t sufficient for decent results, so the costs outweigh the benefits. Cyber criminals are now willing to put a lot of effort into getting their crypto mining code accepted into the Android Play Store, and thus to have it “blessed” with Google’s imprimatur.