Cyber criminals getting good at cryptojacking your devices

Cyber criminals are cryptojacking your devices and stealing computing power to mine cryptocurrencies, and they are getting very good at it. It’s one of the major upcoming cyber crimes in recent years. These type of hackers are in search for computing power to run crypto mining software, most of the time Monero. They search for a security weakness, install some software and reap the rewards. This way they are using computing power from companies and common individuals to generate Monero. But how does it work exactly?

Cyber criminals that are cryptojacking aren’t super hackers, but they use existing vulnerabilities to their own benefit. Most of the time they use well known exploits and search for badly updated computers and servers. In other cases they hope that consumers are dumb enough to click on a link, or visit a certain website. It’s all about getting that little piece of software on the other computer and get it running.

American internet security firm Bad Packets discovered ‘opportunistic mass scanning activity’ on Docker servers on November 26th. This is an example of typical cryptojacking activity. Most of the time hackers are just looking for a weakness in one of the APIs. As soon as a weakness is found, they start an Alpine Linux OS container. This software downloads and runs a script, and in addition that…