Cryptojacking Outpaces RansomWare is the biggest international security threat for Kaspersky Lab

Move Over RansomWare – The biggest international cyber threat is rapidly turning into a mine of illegal cryptocurrencies

With the growing growth of computer literacy, this means that over a billion people are learning to be online each year. But with this comes a growing number of online people who may find themselves subject to some kind of cyber-based attack.

But above all these types of attacks that can happen, we are witnessing a figurative change of the guard that is happening. According to the research organization and provider of cybersecurity, Kaspersky Lab, the illegal hijacking of computers to put them in use to extract cryptocurrencies.

As a system of hardware hijacking, this kind of computer crime it quickly overcame the previously infamous ransomware import method, as we saw in the previous years of 2017 and 16. This method has grown exponentially, with reports coming from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), concludes Kaspersky.

The company, specializing in the supply of IT security solutions for computer users and companies has shown that these mining attacks on users of any scale is almost quadrupled in this area of ​​the world. To put it in a more statistical format, it is more than 10 million more attacks in 2018 (13 million) compared to just over 3.5 million in 2017.

One of the biggest contributors to this exceptional increase of cyber attacks it is, in Kaspersky's discoveries, due to the accelerated use of digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are commonly used in computer crimes and intimate coin deals.

Conductors of these digital attacks often acquire malware on the darkweb, sending it or planting it into the code of a website commonly visited by their unsuspecting users. This allows them to hijack the hardware and use a percentage of its power to extract the cryptocurrencies. Commonly, this processing power is used to extract Monero, which emphasizes the anonymity of the user.

"The region that includes the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) are becoming increasingly tempting for cyber-crime, with cryptocurrency in relation to the mining attacks that focus," according to the senior researcher in cybersecurity for Kaspersky Labs. These crimes are overcoming other methods of cyberattack, simply because "mining is silent, it provides less of an impact on the user than the ransomware, making it more difficult to notice it".

While this is revealing news from the antivirus provider, Kaspersky Labs has its fair dose of skeletons in the metaphorical wardrobe. Just recently, or last year, the US Department of Homeland Security announced a large-scale ban on the use of its antivirus software among the various federal agencies. This was due to a series of concerns expressed on Kaspersky's ties with the Government of the Russian Federation.

Since then, the company has tried in vain to have this ban lifted. The last attempt was last month that he failed to convince the court responsible for his appeal. It means that the supplier is still under federal prohibition.

Regardless of whether the company decides to continue to appeal against this ban, a spokesperson who spoke on behalf of Kaspersky made it clear that the company is committed to providing continuous service to existing and potential customers living in the United States and around the world.

While hidden in his legal battle, the company has never been involved in any kind of illegal activity, nor will it ever be involved in such activities in the future, it has added one.