Pushback from the government authorities and regulators isn’t the only unwanted attention that the cryptocurrency industry has drawn over the past years. It seems that the bullish nature of the market and insane returns also drew cybercriminals towards the industry. This has led to unwanted attention that has revived a kind of malware that has been all but dead for about two years now.
In introduction of cryptojacking, it can be stated that it is a specific type of scam that allows attackers to install malware. These attackers are often called miners on users’ devices. These miners clandestinely utilize your device’s resources in the background to mine cryptocurrency. It is to be noted that crypto jacking used to be popular during the period of 2017-18 but became irrelevant over the past two years or so.
However, security firm Kaspersky in its report has stated that crypto jacking cases had risen considerably in the first quarter of 2021. The report emphatically shows that 432,171 users had encountered miners on their devices in Q1, 2021.
According to the reports, Researchers at Kaspersky saw that number of unique modifications to miners also increased by over four times. It reportedly rose from 3,815 to 16,934. It is to be noted that unique modifications are changes to a miner’s code. This is done in order to mine a new kind of currency or adapt to new systems. Researchers at Kaspersky additionally saw 23,894 new modifications to miners in the first quarter of 2021.
However, Kaspersky wasn’t the only one that noticed the rise. NTT, a Japanese tech services provider also noted that crypto miners made up to 41% of all detected malware in 2020. This is something that tech firms haven’t seen in a long time. Essentially, according to the experts, a rise in crypto prices and the boom in the sector drew more users to the industry, which led to more transactions and trading and hence increased the need for crypto mining.
As it is known, in the world of cryptocurrencies, mining is the arduous but essential process that authenticates all transactions; thus its increase doesn’t come across as a surprise. In simpler words, it maintains the blockchain ledgers. Cryptocurrency transactions are dependent on intricate and challenging mathematical equations that need to be solved. As soon as the computer solves an equation it gets credit for authenticating a particular transaction. This credit comes in the form of new cryptocurrencies, which become a miner’s earnings.
In the past few years, most of the large mining farms of the world were responsible for the crypto mining needs. These were data center like operations that produced more computing power than a thousand mobile phones or computers. As has been previously reported, due to various estimates, almost 70% of the bitcoin mining is done in China. The country is known to be big for Ethereum and other currencies as well.
The fact that mining farms could provide this much power meant that miner software became irrelevant in a way. An attacker would have to infect tens of thousands of computers to make any money from a miner malware. This, along with the fact that security and tech firms were actively tracking them, led miners to die out.
According to a recent study conducted, crypto mining scams can use up as much as 70% of your computers or mobile phone’s resources. This slows down your computer or mobile system down quite noticeably. Another symptom of the same is the heating up of devices unnaturally and even have them catch fire. While you will probably feel your phone or laptop heating up, crypto jacking malware can also affect IoT devices, which you usually wouldn’t monitor the same way.
To top all the detestable inconveniences caused by the crypto scam, the backdoors hackers can also infect your computer, mobile phone, etc. which can consequently also be used to steal your data or spy on you.