A lot of people carry out various tasks on the internet not knowing the repercussions it might cause. While performing those tasks, they think its for their own benefit, not knowing that the are only helping hackers to achieve their goals in life. A major example is when people continuously carry out crypto-mining tasks on a website, thinking that they are actually mining coins for themselves not knowing that their devices are now vulnerable to hacking. It is certain that not many actually know the meaning of Crypto-Jacking.
It is a form of cyber attack in which a hacker hijacks a target’s processing power in order to mine cryptocurrency on the hackers behalf. From this definition, we can also say Crypto-Jacking is the distribution of malicious software (malware or ransomware). Malicious software developers has shown great interest in the distribution of malware or ransomwares to computer devices as it helps them to maximize their profits in the mining activities.
HOW do they get paid from this criminal act? The hackers inject a mining code to any cryptocurrency web browsing website, calling on people to come get some coins for themselves by just mining. The site visitors will unknowingly dedicate their cpu cycles in order to mine the coin, of which the cryptocurrency balance will only be distributed to the criminal who injected the code at first. For the past 6-8 months, hundreds of website have already been infected with such mining code. The problem does not only stop at injecting mining codes into website, but also include the cryptocurrency mining malware that are being distributed in the process which harms every computers involved and eventually lead to a total breakdown of that computer.
McAFee labs threats reported on June 2018, that Crypto-Jacking is no where near it’s end, because many miners and investors don’t actually know what they are doing now. Most of the fake websites that tells it’s users that they actually get coin for mining with their website, include:
Liteminers.cc, quickmining.io, supermining.website. These are only a few of the numerous number of fake websites hackers use to carry out their criminal act. So Beware!!!
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