Blake Dowling
The latest cyberthreat …
This is a nice sequel to my bitcoin article last month. Everyone loves a sequel right? Except for Smokey and the Bandit 3. (Come on man. Burt wasn’t even in the movie.)
OK, there is a new cyber threat that involves criminals diving into the bitcoin mining world. Part 1 is here.
Just like anything that pops up, criminals are bound to jump in and see how to monetize the situation.
Bitcoin mining is no exception.
If you have kept up to date on mining, it takes a lot of computing horsepower. So, where do criminals fit into the picture? They steal that horsepower from your PC.
Cryptojacking is the name of the process; now it’s a thing.
Basically, to mine bitcoin, you need some serious computing power. So, cryptojacking is defined as the secret use of your computing device to mine currency. You are infected in a much different way than most cyberthreats.
This is not coming to you through an open port on your firewall, not an email with a malicious link; you can get it just by web browsing and not even know it. Hackers even found a way to embed the Showtime website with malicious code and take over computers without either side knowing.
You can read more here.
The English government got hit hard this week, and we are going to see a lot more of this type of thing in 2018. Lots of info here.
The more I think about this the worse it becomes. Attackers had arbitrary script injection on thousands of sites including many NHS websites here in England. Just stop and think for a few moments about what exactly they could have done with that capability… 😱
— Scott Helme (@Scott_Helme) February 11, 2018
How to stop this threat? Consult your IT pro, or if you are a pro, monitor your Task Manager, where you can view CPU and memory usage.
If it is peaking and you have only the Burt Reynolds fan site open (just kidding … but there is one), you may have a problem. There are settings to block this type of threat, but Step 1 is knowing about it.
Be safe out there, and stay away from sequels, except Star Wars of course. Ninety-nine days until Solo. The end.
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Blake Dowling is CEO of Aegis Business Technologies and can be reached at [email protected].
