McAfee reports that malware to mine Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies has increased 4.000% in 2018

McAfee's report reports that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining malware has risen 4.000% this year, despite falling prices for all of them.

A few days ago we echoed the scam of Razer with its software for the 'mining' of ZSilver to get peripherals. The practice of hiding miners in software, websites or developing malware for mining is the order of the day. It is not interesting to hijack the user's equipment, since few are those who will pay, it is more profitable to put the equipment to mine. Razer has proven this by scamming users. Now McAfee (antivirus company) reports that the malware that undermines Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies with our system has grown by 4.000%.

McAfee detects that the malware that undermines Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies has grown by 4.000%

Download websites like The Pirate Bay or Better Torrent use Coinhave to mine from our browser. These tools have been detected in Movistar or Starbucks, injected by malicious employees. The latest has been Razer, which uses our GPU to mine Ethereum and our CPU to mine Monero. This means an increase in the energy consumption of the system and a wear and tear of the customer's hardware without permission.

In 2017, these types of tools were minimal, but seeing 100% profitability, many develop this malware in 2018. It is not at all strange and although the price of cryptocurrencies has dropped, getting $ 100 from unsuspecting users is more than anything. . The 4.000% increase is not uncommon, as crackers are always looking to profit from unsuspecting users.

At the same time, extensions have been emerging that actually block these practices. No-Coin is the most popular extension of its kind that mimics AdBlock (ad blocker) that blocks or warns of web mining. CoinHive is a script implemented on some websites to mine coins. After this, other similar tools have appeared and many have seen money in this.

McAfee statement

"The mining of cryptocurrencies through malware is one of the great stories of 2018. The definitive malware 'coin miner' has grown more than 4.000 percent in the last year"

“Security researcher Remco Verhoef discovered a Mac OS threat later called OSX.Dummy, which was distributed in groups of chats tied to cryptocurrencies. Exploitation is simple and requires victims to run a one-line command in the OSX terminal to download and run the payload ”

“Crypto miners will take advantage of any reliable scenario. Some security researchers discovered that the unofficial repositories of the open source media player Kodi have served up a modified add-on that offers crypto mining malware. This operation started in 2017 ”.

What will happen in 2019?

Notably, attackers have seen another more lucrative market and that is routers and IoT devices. These usually have really low security and it's easy to inject a miner. You will get a pittance in coins, but with thousands of these, you can get a little money a day. Despite the decline in the price of cryptocurrencies, these tools continue to develop. McAfee points out that 2019 could see a decline in development if prices continue to be low.

We must emphasize that the value of cryptocurrencies is intact and that in 2019 many changes are expected. Bitcoin Core (main Bitcoin developers) have been making major improvements to the code all of December. It is expected that during Q1 2019 it will go to the public testnet and even if everything goes well it could go to the mainnet during Q1 2019. It should be noted that on January 3, 2019, ten years of the Bitcoin genesis block are celebrated. During these days there is a rumor that Satoshi Nakamoto could activate his dead wallets.