Kaspersky: 13 million cryptographic incidents in 2018, up 400% over last year

Cryptojacking, a malicious activity that involves mining cryptocurrencies hijacking the computing resources of unsuspecting users, has recently surpassed ransomware as the biggest threat to cybersecurity in Africa, Turkey and the Middle East.

13 million incidents related to cryptography this year

This, according to Kaspersky Lab, a provider of solutions for information security and anti-virus multinational based in Moscow. The Russian security company has revealed that cyberattacks involving the extraction of cryptocurrencies have increased almost fourfold in the Middle East and the African continent. There have been around 13 million episodes of cryptojacking this year, compared to 3.5 million in 2017.

Cybercriminals use malware scripts to access users' PCs in order to extract digital currencies, in particular Monero Monet (XMR) focused on privacy. Malware programs usually run as background processes on people's computers, without them noticing it at the beginning. However, these malicious scripts can absorb a lot of CPU power, resulting in a slowdown of the user's computer. In some cases, the user device may even be permanently damaged due to an overload on the processor.

Cryptojacking attacks are executed "in silence"

Explain how the digital currency attacks can be executed in a "silent" way, Fabio AssoliniSenior Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab, said:

The META region is becoming more attractive to cybercriminals, with financial and malicious cryptomining attacks in the foreground. Mining is silent and causes less impact than ransomware, making it less noticeable.

In particular, the use of Kaspersky security software was banned in 2017 by the US Department of Homeland Security. The reason why the American authorities were concerned that the Moscow-based company had ties with the Russian government. Last month, Kaspersky's legal representatives failed to convince the US Court of Appeals (for the DC Circuit Court) to revoke the ban on security products and services (for US consumers).

Kaspersky rejects accusations of misconduct

Commenting on the restrictions imposed on the company, a representative of Kaspersky said that regardless of whether the cybersecurity firm decides to pursue legal redress, it will continue to focus on providing quality services to US customers and other customers in Worldwide. The representative added that Kaspersky has never undertaken any kind of unlawful conduct and that the company will comply with the appropriate rules and regulations in the future.

As reported by CryptoGlobe in late November, Kaspersky researchers found that usually pirated (or unauthorized) software is used to install cryptographic malware scripts. In addition, hackers prefer my privacy-oriented XMR because its proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm allows you to extract cryptocurrency with users' CPU resources.