Cybersecurity company Trend Micro has revealed that between January and July 2018, its researchers detected unauthorized crypto mining attacks – also known as ‘cryptojacking’ – at a rate nearly 1000 percent higher than in the second half of 2017. The information was revealed in the company’s H1 2018 report[1] titled “Unseen Threats, Imminent Losses.”
From Malware to Cryptojacking
One significant insight contained in the report is that cybercriminals who previously favored the use of malware and ransomware to shake down their victims are increasingly looking toward digital coin mining as a new frontier.
Explaining the new threat, an excerpt from the Trends Micro report reads:
“Throughout the next few months, we also saw a noticeable shift away from highly visible ransomware to a more discreet detection: cryptocurrency mining. These damaging threats — from the miners that quietly leech power from victims’ devices to the dangerous vulnerabilities that leave machines open to covert attacks — split limited security resources and divide the focus of IT administrators.”
A cryptojacking attack, while often escaping detection by network security personnel and users can have debilitating consequences for a network or computer equipment such as increased response time and extreme lags, physical degradation of hardware due to increased workload and overheating, and power usage spikes.
The attack is quite devastating because it makes use of a computer system’s graphics processing capability instead of its processor, which slows down a system’s operating speed with serious effects, particularly for an enterprise level computer operation.
The report states that as predicted in 2017, detection of cryptojacking incidents and attempts has increased twofold, and more pertinently, it continues to expand as cybercriminals increasingly see a future in digital currency crime. According to the report, not only is the number of incidents going up, but
