[ad_1]
Last month, more than 170,000 devices in Brazil were targeted by a "cryptojacking" attack.
According to a post published by the security company Trustwave, a large-scale cyber attack was launched on MicroTik routers. The effort led to the installation of Coinhive mining software into a "mass" infection of over 17,000 devices.
Security researcher Trustwave Simon Kenin wrote that all devices used "the same key to access the site", indicating that an entity collected the tokens extracted from all devices.
He wrote:
"This attack may currently be prevalent in Brazil, but during the final stages of writing this blog, I noticed that other geographic areas have also been affected, so I think this attack is destined to be on a global scale."
According to a previous post by Trustwave, also co-author of Kenin, Coinhive has acquired its membership in 2017 as a service that claimed to provide monetizing solutions for websites without the use of any advertising. Instead, site owners had to incorporate JavaScript code that would take over the power of the central processing unit (CPU) of site visitors to extract the cryptocurrency monarch.
However, mining would have cost the site visitors up to 99% of the processing power of the CPU, leading to further problems for consumers, as their devices generate more heat and consume large amounts of electricity.
Trustwave has since released a detection tool to block mining malware and, as Kenin explains in his most recent post, readers should pay attention to the "warning call" and correct all MikroTik devices "as soon as possible", stressing that the severity of the attacks could reach "hundreds of thousands" of consumers worldwide.
Kenin also reports that illegal criptovalute extraction operations like these are "a trend we've seen a lot in the last three years, while attackers move from ransomware to the miners' world."
These feelings are echoed by other information security companies such as Skybox Security, who also reported in their mid-year update in 2018 that among cybercriminals, encrypted extraction accounts for 32% of all cyberattacks, with ransomware representing 8%.
Type the image using Shutterstock
[ad_2]Source link
