How Scammers Steal Your Computing Power to Mine Cryptocurrencies

Cryptojacking, an internet scam found on thousands of websites in which nefarious actors mine cryptocurrencies on computers without users’ permission, has been on the rise since the prices of bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies began spiking last year. The con involves websites stealing computational power from a visitor’s computer to execute the algorithms that are involved in cryptocurrency mining, which requires significant amounts of energy. While it’s most common in the sketchier corners of the internet, hackers have also been able to inject the cryptojacking software onto websites for Showtime and PolitiFact and on e-commerce platforms. Patrons of a Buenos Aires, Argentina, Starbucks branch discovered...

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Is Coin Miner draining your Android device?

The TrendLabs Security Intelligence Blog has identified the Coin Miner mobile malware back in the Google Play store. The malware takes over a device and uses its resources to mine a selection of different cryptocurrencies. Users will often not realise what is going all. What they will see is poor battery life and degraded performance. The apps are using several techniques to bypass security. The blog states: “These apps used dynamic JavaScript loading and native code injection to avoid detection. We detect these apps as ANDROIDOS_JSMINER and ANDROIDOS_CPUMINER.” What apps were used by Coin Miner? This attack is a change to the way coin mining solutions take control of machines. As the report states: “We’ve previously seen tech...

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