Be Alert! Your Smartphone, Smart Fridges, PCs and TVs might be mining bitcoin for criminals

Have you ever noticed that web browser on your phone seems somewhat slower than usual? The most possible reason may be that your phone is mining bitcoin for cyber criminals.

With the increasing popularity of virtual currencies, hackers are now focusing on a new type of burglary called Cryptojacking.

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What is cryptojacking?

Cryptojacking is using of your computing device to secretly mine cryptocurrency. In Cryptojacking malicious program is being installed on peoples' handsets, TVs and smart fridges by hackers that makes them mine for various digital currency. Here, victims may notice a slight drop in processing power, but not even realize it’s a hacking attack. Hackers try to use victims processing power to mine virtual currencies. Some hackers target organizations with large computing power.

Moreover, web browser cryptojacking becomes much easier for hackers as they don’t even need a program to install. The victim visits a website, which latches onto the victim's computer processing power for mining digital currencies as long as victim remains on the site. Many organizations have noticed their monthly electricity bill was increased by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Most popular cryptocurrency mining through Cryptojacking

Monero is one of the most favourite crypto currency of cyber-criminals. A report by cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks estimates that over 5 percent of Monero worth almost $150 million have been mined through crypto-jacking.

As per one of the report published by Kaspersky Lab, a global cybersecurity company, there has been a significant shift by cyber criminals from ransomware-related attacks to crypto-mining malware. The report claims that cryptojacking has proved to be more profitable prospect for hackers as a result of which there is a decline in ransomware attacks.

This is the reason why Apple and Google have started banning applications that mine virtual currencies on their devices.

In a statement to the Financial Times Steve Grobman, CTO of McAfee, stated “With the rise in the value of cryptocurrencies, market forces are driving criminals to crypto jacking and the theft of cryptocurrency.”

How to detect Cryptojacking on your device ?

1. Open the resource manager on your computer and check if the browser CPU usage spikes abnormally high.
2. Close all your browsers and check if your CPU usage still spikes .

This could possibly be a cryptojacking situation.

How to prevent Cryptojacking ?

There are many ways to block cryptocurrency mining taking place from your device. One of the most common method is by making use of Google Chrome extensions. This extensions are small programs that help us in enhancing and modifying the functionality of the Chrome web browser.

There are two such extensions

1.No Coin and
2.MinerBlock

No Coin is one of the most reliable tools for blocking cryptocurrency mining. It is open-source and allows blocking any suspicious activity by simply blocking a list of blacklisted domains in blacklist.txt.

Similar to No Coin, MinerBlock extension also functions by blocking miners all over the sites that we may visit.

Cryptojacking can also be blocked with ad blockers. We may manually block certain domains through different browser settings.

Please feel free to comment your views and suggestions