By Jon Martindale
Making money from mining cryptocurrencies isn’t just something that people do with their own hardware, malware authors have also been creating malicious software to have other people do the hard work them – and we don’t mean cloud mining. While this represents a new fad in the realm of malware authorship though, it may not be around in this guise for long.
“Cryptojacking is outpacing ransomware reports by a factor of 1 to 100, and these numbers will continue to increase …”
In our history of malware feature, we looked at how malware tends to come in waves. While the latest and most dangerous in recent memory has been ransomware, it’s been pushed far from the top spot of common attacks in recent months by the advent of cryptominers, which look to force infected systems to mine cryptocurrency directly. While it may have been riding high recently though, like the value of cryptocurrencies themselves, it’s a malware type that already seems to be on the decline.
Digital Trends spoke with some prominent digital security experts to find out what this means for the near future of malware and what they think cryptomining malware might look like in the months and years to come.
No crowned king lasts forever
“Since cybercriminals are always financially motivated, cryptojacking is yet another method for them to generate revenue,” said Liviu Arsene, senior E-Threat analyst at BitDefender. “Currently, it’s outpacing ransomware reports by a factor of 1 to 100, and these numbers will continue to increase for as long a virtual currencies remain popular and the market demands it.”
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