Over 1.65 Million Users Infected By Cryptocurrency Malware Miners In 2017

Malware miners are in the raise starting from this year, attackers using various social engineering and more sophisticated attacks such as EternalBlue Which results in attackers getting cryptocurrency Malware, while their victim’s computer systems experience a dramatic slowdown due to the mining process.

Over the last month alone, experts from Kaspersky labs have detected several large botnets designed to profit from concealed crypto mining including growing number of attempts.

In 2013 it was around 205,000, it increased in 2014 by 701,000 and in 2017 a dramatic increase within the first eight months it reached 1.65 million.

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Exploiting Methods Cryptocurrency Malware Miners

Attackers use to install miners either by using that are wide spread by Social Engineering Methods and exploiting vulnerabilities like Eternalblue. In Last June attackers even targeted Raspberry Pi for Mining Cryptocurrency.

Attackers use to send ads URL through social Messengers like Telegram and once the user downloads builder from the link it drops the miner with some additional features to the system.

Generally, miners are hard to detect due to of it stealthy nature, even they have additional features like automatic launch every time the computer is switched on, and concealed operation.

Security experts from Kaspersky detected more than 5,000+ computers with miner without user’s knowledge.

• The user downloads an installer from a file hosting service under the guise of a freeware program or keys to activate licensed products.
• When launched, the installer downloads the miner’s dropper (exe) to the victim computer.

Minergate installation

• The dropper writes Minergate and the tool exe to the hard drive, using srvany.exe when the system boots to launch the miner as a service named windows driver.exe.
• The dropper creates an additional service named exe which ensures the continuous operation of Minergate, if Minergate is deleted, the dropper restores it on the hard drive.

Most of the miners mining are monero (XMR) and zcash which ensures anonymity of transactions.The expansion of the cryptocurrency exchange has led to a volatile growth in cases where miners are installed without the user’s knowledge.