With the appearance of cryptocurrency mining as a methods for income, it wouldn’t have been long until hackers and malicious entities endeavored to abuse the network. As indicated in a report by Coin Desk, Kaspersky Lab recently issued a document showing that more than 1.65 million computers were targeted by malware attacks particularly related to crypto mining in the first eight months of 2017.
The Russia-based cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky, uncovered that the PCs being questioned were running their own security programming, which effectively protected them from the malicious attacks. Those computers that have no security installed ran the risk of being co-picked by these hackers, transforming the rig into a mining activity funneling benefits to a hacker source without the owner aware of the change.
Up until this point, the total number of attempted malware hacks for 2017 shows on track to outperform the total number of hack attempts recognized in 2016. In that year, 1.8 million computers were affected. To demonstrate exactly how much the mining business has developed and the time span in which this development has occurred, the number of mining malware attacks in 2014 was only 700,000, based from Kaspersky’s metric.
One motivation behind why the number of hack attempts has developed so rapidly, as indicated by Kaspersky’s report, is that there are currently various botnets which are particularly centered around leading malevolent mining activities. “This results in threat actors accepting digital currency, while their victims’ computer systems encounter a slowdown,” the report states. “They have identified few large botnets intended to profit from concealed crypto mining over the last month alone.”