“Cryptocurrency Mining Malwares Have Increased Since 2018”, McAfee Corporation Says

As popularity and cryptocurrency use have increased this year, the attempts to sabotage on the part of hackers has raised too. According to a recent report by McAfee, cryptocurrency mining malwares have dramatically increased for the past 12 months. McAfee is an American software company in Californian which is busy in cybersecurity. It was bought by Intel company in 2011 and is mostly famous for its Antiviruses.

Sudden upsurge of cryptocurrency mining malwares

Some reports published in December by McAfee show that these malwares have had 4000% growth. Malwares growth graph shows that the growth has started since the last quarter of 2017 and continued to the first quarter of 2018. From the second quarter of 2018, this graph has decreased, and again from the middle of second and third quarter it has enjoyed a sudden rise. These fluctuations show that cryptocurrency hackers have recently targeted miners with a new Cryptojacking malware. Cryptojacking is the illegal use of users’ systems to mine cryptocurrency. It is usually done through installing malicious software or entering a suspicious website and it leads to these users’ hardware corruption. Mining malwares have had 71% growth since the third quarter of 2018. Hackers have targeted those who use Router and IoT devices like IP cameras or video recorder; since this group has lower security when they apply weak CPUs.

Some examples of such mining-related attacks

In another report McAfee described the way the cryptocurrency hackers target messenger services (such as Telegram, Discord and Slack) users. Most of the victims of these attacks were not personal computers and a high number of them includes smart phone users. In a text published in its page, Kaspersky company wrote that its specialists have realized that a malware is sent from various computers and mobile phones to the others and it is transferred through Telegram. Telegram is a popular messenger among cryptocurrency brokers. This virus is sent in the form of an image which starts corrupting hardware when being downloaded and begins mining secretly without the users being noticed.

McAfee report in December

One of the points published by McAfee in December was the existence of underground forums wherein cryptocurrency hackers meet each other. It causes them to work more efficiently. 
Other issues mentioned in McAfee report include cryptocurrency mining and cryptojacking. Kaspersky is also among cybersecurity-related companies which published important reports in terms of crimes in cryptocurrencies. The statistics recently published by this company show that cryptojacking has raised about 40% since 2018. This Russian company has reported that more than 13 million cryptojackings have occurred since 2018, while since 2017, total of 3.5 million cryptojackings have taken place. By developing cryptocurrency use among people, cryptocurrency-related crimes will increase. Today, not only cryptojacking is done through malicious software, but you also get attacked by entering a malicious website and your system will be used while you are not aware of. “What will the effect of these cryptocurrency price volatilities on hackers’ attacks be” is something to be understood in the future, since many miners have stopped working because of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies value decrease.