In 2018, Kaspersky Lab recorded a 4-fold increase in cryptomining attacks in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) region from 3.5 million in 2017 to 13 million this year, the firm said on December 14.
The increase in cryptomining attacks in META comes at a time when digital threats and cybercriminal activities in the region are on the rise. Banking malware attacks reached almost half a million, or a 17% increase, in 2018, according to the KSN statistics by Kaspersky Lab.
“The META region is becoming more appealing to cybercriminals, with financial and malicious cryptomining attacks taking center stage,” Fabio Assolini, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, said in a statement.
“We discovered six new ATM malware families in 2018. On the other hand, illegal mining of cryptocurrencies has increased dramatically to overtake the main threat of the last few years: ransomware. We believe the reason behind this is that mining is silent and cause less impact that ransomware, making it less noticeable.”
2018 saw the global outbreak in malicious cryptocurrency mining, with the number of attacks increasing by more than 83%, with over five million users attacked online in the first three quarters of 2018, compared to 2.7 million over the same period in 2017, according[1] Kaspersky Lab.
As the malicious use of cryptocurrency miners rose this year, ransomware attacks on the other hand decreased as attackers changed strategies, opting instead to perform discreet mining on infected devices rather than demand a ransom and attract attention.
In a report[2] released last month, Kaspersky Lab researchers highlighted that the malicious use of cryptocurrency miners peaked in March with more than 1,169,000 attacks, before decreasing steadily as general interest in cryptocurrencies waned and prices declined.
