CIO & LEADER-Issue-01-April 2018 (1)

Insight
Cryptojacking
Is On The Rise
in 2018
As per Symantec, India is among
the most vulnerable countries
By IANS
W
When
it comes to increased cryptojacking
activities, India is second in the Asia-Pacific
and Japan (APJ) region and ninth globally as
hackers create a highly-profitable, new revenue
stream with crypto-mining, cyber security
giant Symantec said in a recent statement.
According to Symantec's "Internet Security
Threat Report", detection of coinminers on
endpoint computers increased by a whopping
8,500% in 2017.
"Cryptojacking is a rising threat to cyber
and personal security," Tarun Kaura, Director,
Enterprise Security Product Management,
APJ at Symantec, said in a statement.
"The massive profit incentive puts people,
devices and organizations at risk of unauthorized
coinminers siphoning resources from
their systems, further motivating criminals to
infiltrate everything from home PCs to giant
datacenters," Kaura added.
Cryptojacking is defined as the secret use of
a computing device to mine cryptocurrency.
With a low barrier of entry cyber criminals
are harnessing stolen processing power and
cloud CPU usage from consumers and enterprises
to mine cryptocurrency.
Coinminers can slow devices, overheat batteries
and in some cases, render devices unusable.
For enterprise organizations, coinminers
can put corporate networks at risk of shutdown
and inflate cloud CPU usage, adding
to the cost.
"Now you could be fighting for resources on
your phone, computer or Internet of Things
(IoT) device as attackers use them for profit.
People need to expand their defenses or they
will pay for the price for someone else using
their device," Kaura added.
Symantec found 600% increase in
overall IoT attacks in 2017. India today ranks
among the top five countries as a source for
IoT attacks.
The firm also identified a 200% increase in
attackers injecting malware implants into the
software supply chain in 2017.
Threats in the mobile space continue to
grow year-over-year, including the number
of new mobile malware variants which
increased by 54%.
Mobile users also face privacy risks from
grayware apps that are not completely malicious
but can be troublesome. Symantec found
that 63% of grayware apps leak the device's
phone number.
In 2017, the average ransom cost lowered
to USD 522.
"Several cyber criminals may have shifted
their focus to coin mining as an alternative to
cashing in while cryptocurrency values are
high," the report noted
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