I don't like seeing the word Hack in the titles of Crypto articles, but this is interesting. I was reading about how people hack phones in what's being called "cryptojakcing" here's a definition: Cryptojacking is defined as the secret use of your computing device to mine cryptocurrency.
*I'm linking some clippings from the Article below:
Cybercriminals are increasingly hijacking other people’s devices to mine Monero (XMR), in a trend now called cryptojakcing. According to Malwarebytes, a “drive-by” mining campaign recently redirected millions of Android users to a website that hijacked their devices to mine the privacy-centric cryptocurrency using Coinhive .
The campaign worked by redirecting users to a page that told them their device was “showing suspicious surfing behavior.” As such, they needed to verify they were human by solving a CAPTCHA, while their device was used to mine Monero “in order to recover server costs incurred by bot traffic.”
All users had to do was solve the CAPTCHA and click a “continue” button. Once solved, they would be redirected to Google’s home page, which researchers noted was an odd choice. Malwarebytes details that it first spotted the “drive-by” campaign last month, but that it could’ve been around since November 2017. The exact trigger that captured users isn’t clear, but researchers believes infected apps with malicious ads did the trick.
Their post reads:
“While Android users may be redirected from regular browsing, we believe that infected apps containing ad modules are loading similar chains leading to this cryptomining page. This is unfortunately common in the Android ecosystem, especially with so-called “free” apps.”
While on their PCs users can block cryptocurrency mining scripts by using anti-malware programs on their machines and browsing the web through browsers with inbuilt tools like Opera and Brave, Android users are advised to stick to Google’s Play Store, and use security software.
I'm posting this picture as well to help better visualize what Cryptojacking actually looks like, thanks for reading!
credit: CCN