The Kaspersky Lab Anti-Malware Research team has identified two crypto-mining botnets comprising thousands of infected PCs.<\/p>\n
When a device is infected with crypto-mining malware, the graphics card or processor of the infected device is used to secretly mine and send cryptocurrency to the attacker.<\/p>\n
The researchers estimated that a 4,000-machine network could bring its owners up to $30,000 a month, and witnessed criminals scoring more than $200,000 from a 5,000-PC botnet in one instance.<\/p>\n
Bitcoin is not very profitable to mine using a standard PC, and cybercriminals are directing their botnets to mine digital currencies like Monero and ZCash.<\/p>\n
These altcoins have seen a large increase in value this year and have the advantage of providing users with anonymity.<\/p>\n
Kaspersky’s research showed a steady increase in cryptocurrency miner-related malware over the last few years, with the number of threats blocked growing from 701,000 in 2014 to 1.65 million in the first 8 months of 2017.<\/p>\n
The company warned that this malware is commonly installed within adware, and advised consumers to avoid suspicious downloads and update their security solutions.<\/p>\n
The Kaspersky Lab Anti-Malware Research team has identified two crypto-mining botnets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":79691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44696,27],"tags":[45977,45975,15227,1595],"class_list":["post-228713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","category-security","tag-botnets","tag-crypto-mining","tag-cybersecurity","tag-kaspersky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228713"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228713"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":228715,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228713\/revisions\/228715"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}