Kaspersky, a Russian software company specializing in computer security and antivirus software, saw a sharp rise in malicious variants of cryptominers in the third quarter of 2022. This compares to the same period but a year earlier. There appeared to be an increase of 230% over this period.
More than 150,000 variants
The number of crypto-miner variants has now exceeded 150,000. Such miners often remain hidden for months, using the processing power of a victim’s computer. In addition, it appears that Monero (XMR) is the most popular crypto for malicious crypto miners.
Although crypto prices took a hard hit during 2022, criminal activity targeting cryptocurrency does not appear to be slowing down, according to Kaspersky’s new research report “The state of cryptojacking in 2022“.
Many illegal crypto miners joined
Mining cryptocurrencies is a costly process. You need a lot of computing power to mine crypto and that is expensive. Still, it can be a very rewarding thing for cybercriminals. By avoiding the costs of purchasing equipment and electricity, this becomes a very favorable revenue model. Clever tricks allow cyber criminals to install mining software on victims’ computers which then use their processing power for their own mining activities.
It is a method that in itself does not require a lot of technical knowledge, because in fact the cyber attacker only needs to know how to create a miner using open source code, or where to buy one. The tricky part is getting the software onto victims’ computers. But once this is done, it provides the operator with a steady income.
The rapidly growing figures show that this is not a very difficult method. Many new variants of illegal crypto miners have surfaced in 2022 alone. During the first 3 quarters of 2022, expert analysis identified 215,843 new miners, more than twice as many as in the same period last year. The third quarter in particular has a major contribution to this: here the number of new malicious miners exceeds 150,000.
Monero very popular
An analysis made by Kaspersky shows that Monero (XMR) in particular is very popular among cyber criminals. 48% of all crypto mined through this route is XMR. This is not entirely unexpected, however, as this currency is known for its advanced technologies that anonymize transaction data to achieve maximum privacy.
Those who monitor it cannot decipher addresses traded in Monero, transaction amounts, balances or transaction histories. These factors are very attractive to cyber criminals.
The most common way to proliferate such malicious software is through pirated content. This includes films, music, games and other software. Also, unpatched vulnerabilities are a way for cyber criminals to proliferate miners.
Unfortunately, such attacks are becoming increasingly common. Although the number of threats is increasing, there are no dramatic changes in the number of users encountering such miners. For this reason, it is important to make people aware of the early signs that malware is being downloaded onto computers. It is also necessary to install a reliable security solution that prevents attacks at an early stage.