Students Mining Cryptocurrencies Are Clogging up University Networks

[Faybert]

Content source

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/cryptocurrency/students-mining-cryptocurrencies-are-clogging-up-university-networks/

Cryptocurrency mining operations, illegal or not, are becoming a real problem for the higher education sector, where hackers have found plenty of easy to hack systems, but also where students are using university resources to make an extra profit via deliberate cryptocurrency mining.
This is the main conclusion of an AMS Vectra report that analyzed attacker behavior by industry, and which found that the higher education sector was the industry vertical with the most infected devices and the most detections of malicious events.
Higher education sector was the most targeted by hackers
The study, which analyzed data from 4.5 million monitored devices across 246 organizations found, on average, 165 infected devices and 1,403 malicious events for every 10,000 systems.
But for the educational sector, the detection rate was of 542 devices (three times the normal average) and 3,715 events (two and a half times the normal detection rate).
The reason, researchers say, is because big university campuses represent "ideal pastures" for hackers. With an initial foothold on any of these large networks, a hacker could easily identify and infect multiple computers in one fell swoop.
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Students deliberately mining cryptocurrencies
But besides PCs that were obviously infected by hackers, researchers also detected cryptocurrency mining operations that took place via systems that didn't show any signs of infection.
Students were mining cryptocurrencies using their personal PCs as a way to make an extra profit. Coinmining from a university's network has its advantages, the main being that students aren't burdened with the electricity bill that is usually associated with this type of activity. In most cases, students benefit from free electricity, costs covered as part of their tuition fee.
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