Report by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky observed that ransomware attacks have risen in 2019. The report also noted that crypto mining attacks have decreased significantly in this period.
Crypto mining attacks
Crypto mining attacks make use of a person’s computer to secretly mine crypto assets. The malware is often attached to links and downloads and secretly installs a miner that uses a person’s processing power to earn income for the attacker. Often the person attacked does not even know that he hosts the malware but he might notice a decrease in performance as the system is overloaded.
According to the firm’s “Kaspersky Security Bulletin ‘19” report, the total number of mining malware attacks saw a decrease in 2019. The number of cases reported dropped from 5.64 million to 2.26 million a decline of nearly 60 percent.
Crypto mining attacks affected 150,000 people in 2019 as compared to over 450,000 people in 2019. A single malware software, ‘Trojan.Win32.Miner.bbb’ was responsible for over 13 percent of all attacks. The report did not discuss which crypto assets were most targeted.
It is believed that the drop in such attacks was caused by the Bitcoin bears. As Bitcoin’s price decreased the process of mining became less profitable and hence less attractive to attackers.
Although crypto-mining attacks decreased the situation did not become any more pleasant for the industry as other forms of attacks saw a rise in popularity. Meanwhile, the total number of “unique malicious objects” reported increased by almost 14 percent. These attacks were mostly related to online files created for stealing credit cards.
Crypto ransomware attacks also came to prominence during 2019. In such an attack the hacker encrypts the users’ files and takes the data hostage. The hacker then demands a payment for decrypting these files. Kaspersky observed 22 new families of crypto-ransomware and over 46,000 modifications to existing strands of ransomware,
