Kaspersky Lab flags up rise of malicious crypto miners

Kaspersky Lab’s research, which covers April to March 2016-2017 and April to March 2017-2018, shows that while ransomware can provide cybercriminals with potentially large but one-off rewards in a turbulent landscape, miners might make less money out of their victims, but through a more sustainable/longer-term model.

PC and mobile ransomware attacks on unique users dropped dramatically in 2017-2018 (by almost 30% and 22.5% respectively). Cybercriminals are instead opting to make their money out of cryptocurrency miners. Malicious miners do so at the expense of other users, capitalising on the power of their computers and devices without their knowledge.

According to the report, PC crypto miners are steadily growing. The total number of users who encountered this form of mining rose from 1,899,236 in 2016-2017, to 2,735,611 in 2017-2018. Mobile crypto miners are also emerging as a threat, with unique attacks growing by 9.5%. Overall, this form of mining targeted almost 5,000 users in 2017-2018, compared to around 4,500 users in 2016-2017. Mobile users in China and India are particularly under threat.

“It is clear to see why we are seeing these changes in the cyberthreat landscape. The mining model allows cybercriminals to attack their victims discreetly – generating cryptocurrency by using CPU or GPU power and transferring that into real money through legal exchanges and transactions. Ransomware, on the other hand, is a noisy and risky way of making money; it attracts media and state attention, hence the shift to crypto mining,” says David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab.