According to research by Symantec, cryptojacking increased 85-fold in the fourth quarter compared to the previous quarter. And hackers are thanking
There’s an old phrase that comes back into fashion every now and then: “Follow the money”. It is one of the most famous phrases from “All the President’s Men”, a film about the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation as President of the United States. These three words are often repeated even more than forty years later and serve to understand how the world is moving.
Let’s take the cybersecurity industry as an example. To understand what the biggest dangers are and will be for users and companies, all you have to do is “follow the money.” What is one of the topics that has been discussed the most in recent months and that has affected both the financial and business worlds? Bitcoins. The cryptocurrency has experienced a scary growth in the last months of 2018, coming close to a value of $20,000. In just a few months, the cryptocurrency market has mobilized resources worth billions and billions, and the first to take advantage of it have been hackers.
The hackers immediately found a way to be able to make money from the world of cryptocurrency. And as is their habit in an illicit way. Hackers have developed programs that install themselves within websites and exploit users’ devices to generate Bitcoin. The process is much simpler than it may seem: it only takes a few minutes for a hacker to insert these software inside a website and start earning money. This practice is called cryptojacking and is considered the number one danger to users’ cybersecurity. According to Symantec’s latest report in the fourth quarter of 2017, cryptojacking increased 85 times compared to the previous quarter, forcing cybersecurity companies to implement ad hoc updates to put a brake on hackers.
Cryptojacking, Symantec’s numbers
The data released by Symantec in its latest report is dramatic: cryptojacking continues to spread within websites and nothing seems to be able to stop it. In all of 2017, it grew by 34,000%, numbers not seen in many years in the world of cybersecurity. By now, hackers manage to infect even the most user-frequent sites, without webmasters being able to discover the presence of malicious programs on top of their sites.
Why is cryptojacking such a popular practice among hackers? Because it has very low development costs (you only need to develop a few lines of code), it is easy to use and most importantly it guarantees a very high yield. In a week you can earn thousands of euros without any effort. The other great advantage of cryptojacking is that users are unaware of being exploited to produce cryptocurrencies: no malware is installed on the smartphone or computer and knowing that the website has been infected is practically impossible. The only signs involve slowdowns on the part of one’s device and abnormal battery heating.
How to stop cryptojacking
Hackers will stop making this kind of software when generating Bitcoin and other cryptomoney is no longer profitable. Despite the decline the cryptocurrency market has had in recent months, it is still profitable for hackers to invest time and money in developing cryptojacking programs. The only hope lies with the companies that develop antivirus: progress has been made, but it is still not enough.