Bitcoin miner mac deutschland
It was not smooth sailing for the attackers. Even if they were successful, the telecom company scooped up half of the money. Then, the premium phone numbers could be blocked, as could the money collected on corresponding accounts.
Finally, perpetrators risked getting busted by the police when cashing out. Cryptocurrencies were a game changer. This type of ransomware encrypts user data and demands a ransom payable in a cryptocurrency, and only after payment is made will the attacker perhaps send the decryption key to restore file access.
Even those far from the world of cyberthreats have probably heard about WannaCry. Although WannaCry was actually a wiper , it found notoriety as encrypting ransomware. For attackers, cryptocurrencies must seem heaven-sent: Bitcoin is not really anonymous , but an attacker can use alternative cryptocurrencies such as Monero or ZCash without fear of being tracked.
This simplification of the monetization process has led to an unprecedented spread of ransomware. Mining — reaping new cryptocoins by means of lengthy, complex calculations — is no less popular as a form of cybercrime. Truth be told, this scenario is preferable to the previous one, and unprotected users may consider themselves lucky if their computers are merely used for covert mining, with no encrypting of valuable data.
Incidentally, over the first eight months of , our products protected 1. After that, everything became even simpler — now users can be conscripted into a mining scheme just by visiting a website that makes the browser download a script that makes their computer mine money.
This innovation is seriously restructuring money-making schemes online. It could even be profitable to let users watch new movies without charging them a fee, and just mine away in the background while the flick is playing.
Cybercriminals are highly adept at switching to the latest, most lucrative method. Several thousand computers on a botnet can mine cryptocurrencies much more effectively than a single computer can. In the case of a mining botnet, victims also foot the electricity bill, making installing miner applications on the computers of unsuspecting users a very lucrative business for hackers.
Note that a rank-and-file user can install a miner application intentionally, to mine cryptocurrency on their own. Distinguishing legal mining from illegal activity is the challenge. Miner applications are identical; the difference is in the covert installation and operation of illegally acting applications.
In most cases, a miner ends up on a computer with the help of a purpose-built malicious application, a so-called dropper whose chief function is to secretly install another application. Droppers usually come under the guise of pirated versions of licensed products or activation key generators for them. Users look for this type of software on peer-to-peer networks and download it intentionally. The application can also come complete with services that ensure its autorun and configure its settings.
For example, such services can suspend the miner when the user starts certain popular computer games. Such services can also attempt to disable antivirus products, suspend the miner when a system monitoring tool is running, and restore the miner if the user tries to delete it.
Hackers distribute such applications as a service. They use Telegram channels devoted to online work opportunities; you might come across ads offering trial versions of such droppers for distributing a hidden miner. To give you an idea of the scale of this phenomenon: Our experts recently detected a botnet consisting of an estimated several thousand computers on which the Minergate miner was secretly installed. It mines not highly popular bitcoins but mostly those cryptocurrencies, such as Monero XMR and Zcash ZEC , that allow the concealing of transactions and wallet ownership.
Monero wallet, used by criminals, mentioned above. Kaspersky Internet Security protects you against malicious droppers by default. If for some reason you deactivate AV and run a manual scan after becoming suspicious, Kaspersky Internet Security will immediately detect this full-fledged Trojan and prompt you to get rid of it.
Unlike droppers, miners are not malicious applications, as we mentioned earlier. Kaspersky Internet Security does not block or remove such applications by default; a user may have installed them on purpose.