BlackBerry pointed to real threats of hidden mining

BlackBerry CEO says many companies don't have a clear understanding of the harmcan cause cryptomining viruses in combination with other malware.

The introduction of a cryptominer virus is likeexternal threat and internal. Despite the fact that today hacker technologies have reached unprecedented heights, however, it is not always they that affect the system of corporate computers. According to BlackBerry CEO Josh Lemos, in most cases, company employees themselves install malware on computers and use the computing power of corporate machines to mine cryptocurrency.

Lemos stated that the software forcrypto mining is not necessarily malicious, but rather opportunistic, i.e. uses computing resources for monetary gain, "although you often find it bundled with malware," this is also a fact.

Most often, hackers and corporate employees install a hidden miner virus for mining Monero cryptocurrency. Lemos himself comments on the love of cybercriminals for this coin:

“Monero is considered more profitable for the averageuser due to the peculiarities of the mining algorithm. Every time you have uneducated users looking for a quick buck, you will have more opportunities to exploit. The old adage is still true: the best way to get rich in the gold rush is to sell shovels. In this case, the miner viruses that can be easily purchased on the darknet act as shovels, ”says Lemos.

As the COVID-19 pandemic is still active inseveral countries, Lamos argues that as long as cryptocurrencies are considered “valuable alternative investments,” the trend towards cryptocurrency attacks will continue.

Cybercriminals are ready to hack likecorporate systems and systems of retail users in order to install the hidden mining virus. Dozens of government organizations and private corporations have already become victims of fraudsters. So it became known earlier that scammers have learned to embed mining viruses into the servers of government services, which have a high degree of protection. At the same time, the speed and performance of the server itself decreases, which leads to downtime and losses in business.

For several years in Russia to a criminalOnly two people were prosecuted for infecting computers with a mining virus. One incident was registered in the Novgorod region, where a local resident infected an entire network of computers in several regions of Russia with a mining virus. The second case was identified in the Rostov region. An employee of Rostovvodokanal uploaded a hidden mining virus to the organization's website. As a result, the malware got into almost all computers of the water utility workers.

It was also recently reported that severalsupercomputers across Europe have been infected by an unknown virus that harnessed the power of machines to mine cryptocurrencies. The hacking of the system was announced almost simultaneously in Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland and Spain.

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