One year later, Wired reported that a similar attack occurred, rendering a large portion of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv without power. In 2018, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that Russian hackers gained control of numerous electrical grid control rooms across the U.S., according to The New York Times. The hackers could have caused blackouts, but the security technicians uncovered the attack before it caused any damage.
Cryptojacking is malicious cryptomining that happens when cybercriminals hack into both business and personal computers, laptops, and mobile devices to install software. This software uses the computer’s power and resources to mine for cryptocurrencies or steal cryptocurrency wallets owned by unsuspecting victims. The code is easy to deploy, runs in the background, and is difficult to detect. Cryptojacking uses a victim’s computing power to perform the complex mathematical operations needed to mine cryptocurrency and send the results to the cryptojacker’s server.
Cryptojacking explained: How to prevent, detect, and recover from it
It used obfuscated PowerShell commands, eventually leading to the execution of a Monero cryptomining payload. The miner was set to use 80 percent of the target’s CPU resources, which has a significant effect on the usability of the affected systems. According to security researcher Troy Mursch, both the legitimate, non-consensual and criminal uses of Coinhive led to the company holding 62 percent https://www.tokenexus.com/ of the browser-based cryptojacking market share, as of August 2018. Cryptomining can be incredibly intensive, so it can drain your battery much more rapidly than normal and draw a greater amount of electricity from your home. The actual amount of power consumption depends on how many devices in your home are involved in cryptojacking, how intensely they are mining, and how long they are on for.
- In this article, we’ll focus on Bitcoin mining since this is the most common type of cryptocurrency.
- Similar to CryptoLocker, malware can be used to infect computers, encrypt files, and hold them for Bitcoin ransom.
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- It spread rapidly by scanning for a wide variety of vulnerabilities, including MySQL, MS-SQL, Telnet, SSH, RDP and more.
- Cryptojacking cybercrimes can affect both personal and business technology and are capable of infiltrating personal computers, smartphones, and tablets.
It took awhile for the threat to be detected because the amount of computing power the script used was decreased, so users would not be able to tell their device had been enslaved. Some cryptomining scripts have worming capabilities that allow them to infect other devices and servers on a network. These scripts may also check to see if the device is already infected by competing cryptomining malware. The term, as a portmanteau of cryptocurrency and hijacking, refers to the practice of hackers who take control of their targets — such as computers, smart devices, and even entire servers — to mine for crypto. This is particularly important if your device is part of a larger network of computers that uses a collective firewall.
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They go after everyone from average users to the government agencies around the world. Last summer Bitdefender discovered a Romanian threat group that was targeting Linux-based machines with SSH credentials to deploy Monero mining malware. This example was on the spear tip of what appears to be a growing trend of Linux system cryptomining attacks. A report earlier this year from VMware detailed a growing targeting of Linux-based multi-cloud environments, particularly using the XMRig mining software. The software supply chain security experts at Sonatype in fall of 2021 sounded the alarm on malicious cryptomining packages hiding in npm, the JavaScript package repository used by developers worldwide. Regardless of the delivery mechanism, cryptojacking code typically works quietly in the background as unsuspecting victims use their systems normally.
Cryptojackers now distribute their attacks to as many people as possible, letting the attackers use less power per device and decrease their detectability. The browser-based approach works by creating content that automatically runs cryptomining software in a user’s web browser when they visit the webpage hosting it. Cryptojackers may create a website with embedded cryptomining JavaScript code and direct traffic to it for the purpose of cryptojacking, or they may compromise an existing site.
Leveraging cloud infrastructure
In other cases, website owners add the cryptocurrency mining scripts on their own, and they make the profit. While Bitcoin is the most widely known cryptocurrency, cryptojacking attacks usually involve mining other cryptocurrencies. Monero is particularly common, as it’s designed so people can mine it on average PCs. Monero also has anonymity features, which means it’s difficult to track where What is cryptojacking the attacker ultimately sends the Monero they mine on their victims’ hardware. The value of cryptocurrencies, even those that may never be directly used to purchase goods and services, is central to the cryptojacking problem. Some of the tokens take so little computing power to generate that a relatively weak computer or device, once it has been hacked, can be a useful money-making tool.
Unless you have a house packed with devices that are actively cryptojacking, you might not notice a spike in your electricity bill, but it’s still possible. Another option for cryptojacking detection is to run an antivirus scan and see if anything pops up. Although some legitimate cryptojacking code may be whitelisted by certain antivirus software, the more common ones that cryptojack in secret are likely to be flagged. While the amount of resources drawn will vary, cryptojacking malware or browser-based cryptojacking can cause other websites to load slowly and make many processes lag. When an Ars Technica reporter visited a website that hosted a cryptojacking script, they saw a huge spike in their CPU load.
How to detect cryptojacking
In some cases, the cryptomining code downloads multiple versions and tries to execute them, until one is successful. If this is the case, it’s a very serious issue – not only has your site been draining the resources of its guests, but it also means that your site has been compromised and attackers could be causing other damage. One of the good things about the page was that it allowed site visitors to choose how much of their processing power they were donating. If it slowed down their computer too much, they could cut it back to a more manageable level. Alternatively, they could just let it run whenever their computer was idling.
- You don’t have to worry about ventures like the Hopepage, because they aren’t like all of the other cryptojacking schemes that we mentioned.
- Since the autumn of 2017, many websites and even some critical-infrastructure computer networks have been infected by, or deliberately set up to host, coin-mining programs.
- Once they’re in, the hacker has full access to sensitive files, but instead of trying to blackmail their victim, the hacker just deletes everything.
- It was relatively simple to hack vulnerable sites and insert the Coinhive script onto them, with any Monero mined by the site’s visitors going straight to the wallets of the attackers.
- An alternative system known as proof-of-stake system is used in Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, but it’s outside of the scope of this article.
There are hundreds of cryptocurrencies, and each has its own coin or token. Each cryptocurrency was invented to solve a problem its creators felt other cryptocurrencies did not adequately address. One way of simplifying the vast array of cryptocurrencies is by focusing on the platforms used to make them.
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One such activity is “mining,” a legal process where individuals use computing power to solve complex mathematical puzzles, verifying digital transactions. However, this process is resource-intensive, requiring massive amounts of computing power and electricity, which can be prohibitively expensive. Cybercriminals are targeting the software supply chain by seeding open-source code repositories with malicious packages and libraries that contain cryptojacking scripts embedded within their code. With developers downloading these packages by the millions around the globe, these attacks can rapidly scale up cryptojacking infrastructure for the bad guys in two ways. The malicious packages can be used to target developer systems—and the networks and cloud resources they connect to—to use them directly as illicit cryptomining resources. Or they can leverage these attacks to poison the software that these developers are building with components that execute cryptomining scripts on the machines of an application’s end user.