Should the enterprise be worried by hidden cryptocurrency mining software installed on endpoints? SC Media has asked the cybersec industry…
Kaspersky Lab data shows that cryptocurrency mining infections have spiked in recent years. In 2013 only around 205,000 endpoints were seen to be targeted by Kaspersky, which jumped to 701,000 the following year. In the first eight months of 2017 the number of attacked users has already hit 1.65 million. So what exactly is a cryptocurrency miner? The answer is a piece of software that performs a perfectly legal task of utilising CPU resources to ‘create’ cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin for example.
Professor Kevin Curran, senior IEEE member and professor of cyber-security at Ulster University told SC Media that miners have “moved away from attempting to mine Bitcoin due to the computation power needed” and instead “moved to more reasonable cryptocurrencies like Monero and zcash as mining on sufficient general purpose processors can yield good returns when you are not paying for the power consumed.”
