Millions Of Computers Can Be Used To Dig Up Virtual Money

With cryptojacking, hackers use the user’s device to secretly exploit virtual money for personal gain

A new danger has emerged on the Internet – cryptojacking – exploiting unauthorized virtual currency. Laptops, PCs and cell phones used by victims are used to exploit virtual money while they are unaware. This happens when a user visits a website that contains malicious code.

Cryptojacking And Profit Collecting

Illegal virtual currency software is not a strange thing, but cryptojacking is more outstanding than its highly sophisticated tricks. Hackers do not need to install malicious software on the machine, users can be attacked from multiple sources.

Cryptojacking uses Javascript to penetrate and exploit virtual currency from a computer as soon as a user accesses a website that contains malicious code. There is no immediate warning about the computer being stolen virtual money. Users do not even see the degradation of the computer.

The idea of ​​cryptojacking began in mid-September by Coinhive. This company offers the code to exploit Monero virtual currency upon page load. Website The Pirate Bay immediately apply this method to make profits. Just a few weeks later, a series of hackers mimicked Coinhive. They even find code for sites such as Politifact.com and Showtime .

The most obvious manifestation of cryptojacking is that the CPU is operating at a higher level than normal, causing the power bill to increase. But this method is not completely accurate as most cryptojacking codes use only a fraction of the CPU power.

According to Karl Sigler, director of intellectual research at SpiderLabs, cryptojacking is a combination of two types of malicious software: using embedded code to spread, run ads, or navigate to specific websites and steal. virtual money from wallet or exploit it with user’s device.

However, the trouble is that if the device is properly protected, cryptojacking will become a useful building tool. Coinhive has always insisted the company’s goal of developing cryptojacking is to add new revenue to the site.

According to TorrentFreak calculations , with about 315 million hits per month, an average of 5 minutes, midrange laptops have 30h / sec speed, miners pay 0.00015 Monero (XRM) for every one million hash. Therefore, the Pirates Bay site will earn 2.835 million million hits a month when the CPU works well. This means the Pirates Bay gains $ 12,000 a month.

Do users know?

In fact, many websites use this method for maintenance purposes. Moreover, this technology can be used instead of advertising, which is always concerned about the security of the browser.

Websites that use this technology soon offer users the choice: to advertise or to take a small fraction of CPU performance per page load. When The Pirates Bay asked this question in mid-September, most users agreed to allow virtual money to be cut if the ads were dropped.

However, if multiple sites use this technology or the exploit process fails, the processor will be overloaded. Typically, The Pirates Bay, originally designated 20-30% CPUs to dig money, but due to programming errors, the level of exploitation is limitless.

The more worrying thing is that users can be exploited to exploit virtual currency without knowing it. To protect yourself against cryptojacking, users can use the browser-based ad blocker for websites that already know or suspect malicious code.

In addition, the Chrome browser has an extensible feature called No Coin, developed by Rafael Keramidas, which prevents the exploitation of virtual coins by Coinhive and other “miners”.

Some malware scanning tools have begun blocking the program of exploiting virtual currency. Coinhive and a number of similar programs need to take measures to regain the confidence of customers if they want to be unblocked. For example, incorporating hard-coded authentication protections, or displaying the power level of the processor used to exploit virtual currency.

To overcome this problem, Coinhive introduced a new version of cryptojacking called AuthedMine. AuthedMine will require users to turn their browser into a Monero transmitter. Coinhive insists that AuthedMine will never work without the user’s permission.

This is a positive step, but the virtual currency exploit code, including the original Coinhive, has been widely spread across the network and has no way of recovering it. Even when the mining process is completely transparent, it still contains many potential risks.

According to Karl Sigler, the choice of the user does not eliminate the risk from the instability of the process. Many computers that stop working at the same time or some important work are lost due to virtual currency exploitation will heavily affect the organization’s network.

However, even if blocked, hackers can still develop the technology of digging money, making it more sophisticated and difficult to detect. They can use redirection techniques to send users to websites that contain cryptojacking code or combine jitter in Javascript to circumvent the malware scanner.

Hopefully in the next few years, this technology will evolve to the level of security that all users can trust to use. Like many other web-based tools, cryptojacking promises tremendous innovation and many users are ready to take it.