14 DAY TRIAL // Coin mining focused malware has seen a massive increase in activity in the second quarter of 2018, as the number of samples detected has grown by 86% according to a report by McAfee Global Threat Intelligence.
The samples collected and added by McAfee into its database come from its own crawlers and spam traps, as well as customer submissions other industry sources.
As reported by McAfee, the number of total coin miner samples grew significantly during Q2 2018, with an excess of 2.5 million new samples being added to their malware database.
Coin miner based malware is designed to hijack vulnerable systems to stealthily mine for cryptocurrency in the background without the knowledge or consent of the victims.
Cryptojacking attacks have become a lot more attractive to threat actors because of the less amount of effort they have to put in for compromising vulnerable systems, as well as the considerable payoff an extensive network of coin miners could bring.
Crypto mining malware is the most used malicious tool by bad actors for quick and easy illegal earnings
Once a machine is exploited, and the coin miner payload settles in and starts working for the crooks, it will go on working in the background and earning money until an eventual detection and removal.
The only investment made by the cyber crook is the time needed to find vulnerable systems and set it up for the cryptojacking attack.
Moreover, the most significant important issue is that not only home users have a difficult time defending themselves against such attacks, but privately-owned companies and even governments have also been affected by cryptojacking attacks.
"We have seen breaches in which bad actors uploaded their own containers and added them to a company’s cloud environment—which started to mine cryptocurrency," says McAfee's report (PDF).
Crypto mining malware affects both desktop and mobile environments, with multiple reports of cryptojacking Android apps found in the Google Play store and persistent EternalBlue-powered malicious crypto miners hunting down other crypto malware surfacing in the last month alone.
