Protecting Your Business From Cryptocurrency Malware Attacks

Cryptocurrency may be the most notable success of blockchain technology, but not everything about it is gold.

- Wayne Rash

Miners have found a new way to make money for themselves while also reducing their costs. It’s easy: They just have you pay for it.

What’s happening is that hackers install code on a site that you’re likely to visit for a long time. While you’re there, an infected ad injects cryptocurrency-mining software into your computer, where it’ll mine for currency while you’re trying to do something else.

This practice appeared on YouTube in mid-January and was first reported by researchers at Trend Micro, who said that the DoubleClick ad network was being abused to deliver currency mining malware. The apparent reason was that people tend to stay on YouTube for an extended period, giving the currency mining software more time to work.

The malware comes from Coinhive, computer code that allows the mining software to run on other people’s computers and use their resources. Reportedly, currency mining can suck up about 80 percent of a computer’s resources, which leaves enough available that most people don’t notice it during casual use.

THE BUSINESS COST

But your organization will notice, especially if the illicit cryptocurrency mining starts to spread on your network or especially on your servers. Even when you’re paying for data center services, that computing power costs you money; if you lose capacity because unauthorized software is eating CPU cycles, then you may have to buy more capacity.