Malware News Cryptocurrency-Mining Malware Targeting IoT, Being Offered in the Underground

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Content source

https://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/cryptocurrency-mining-malware-targeting-iot-being-offered-in-the-underground/

IoT as target of cryptocurrency-mining malware

The computing power of smartphones and IoT devices is much lower than that of servers or even laptops. However, we definitely see criminals creating cryptocurrency-mining malware to infect these devices. An example of it is DroidMiner, advertised in a forum in 2017:
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It does seem that cryptocurrency malware is gaining traction as a topic in forums in the cybercriminal underground, with some dedicated to exploring whether compromising connected devices (however underpowered) for financial gain is a plausible venture. Still, it is not as profitable as other criminals may think — at least not yet.


Details on our cryptocurrency-mining malware findings in the underground, including the most targeted cryptocurrencies and advertised malware features, can be found in this research brief.

Protection against cryptocurrency-mining malware

Mining for cryptocurrency is a computationally intensive task that requires significant resources, not to mention high power consumption. Be that as it may, mining does generate money and we do see related activity on stealing the resources of infected machines, significantly affecting their performance and increasing their wear and tear. In fact, cryptocurrency mining was the most detected home network event by the Trend Micro™ Smart Home Network solution in 2017, while cryptocurrency-mining malware gained momentum toward the end of the year as detected by the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™ infrastructure.

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