Resellers need to warn their customers about the dangers of cryptocurrency according to security experts.
Customers are turning to the channel to help solve issues like mobile, sophisticated nation state attacks and malicious cryptocurrency mining which are arriving in the train of the obsession with cryptocurrency .
Malwarebytes has focused on crytocurrency mining with it being the top detected issue since September last year. Although a lot of people don’t take the issue that seriously the dangers are there because some of the coin miners are using the same vulnerabilities exposed by other threats like ransomware to get access to user computing power.
“Cryptomining malware provides a good use case for leveraging the size and power of a botnet in order to perform CPU-intensive mining tasks without having to bear the costs incurred in the process. In some aspect, drive-by mining also applies the same concept, except that the botnet of web users it creates is mostly temporary, stated the Malwarebytes’ The State of Malicious Cryptomining report.
“While malicious cryptomining appears to be far less dangerous to the user than ransomware, its effects should not be undermined. Indeed, unmanaged miners could seriously disrupt business or infrastructure critical processes by overloading systems to the point where they become unresponsive and shut down. Under the disguise of a financially-motivated attack, this could be the perfect alibi for advanced threat actors”, it added.
With the rise in the value of cryptocurrency there has been a parallel increase in the number of attacks on devices that can be used maliciously for mining coins.
