In the third quarter of 2020, the activity of hidden mining programs increased. This is stated in the rating of threats compiled by ESET.
Experts associate the new popularity of cryptojacking with the rise in the price of bitcoin, which reached a two-year high above $ 13,000 in September.
During this period, one of the active programs aimed at stealing and extracting cryptocurrency was the KryptoCibule malware. The functions of the virus allow it to launch hidden mining on the victim's device, change the addresses of cryptocurrency wallets and steal personal information.
The number of malicious emails increased 9% quarter-on-quarter. A version of the WannaCry malware was distributed via mailing lists, the damage from which in 2017 exceeded $ 1 billion.
“Despite the decline in ransomware attacks, more than half of all detected samples in this category of viruses were from Win / Filecoder.WannaCrypto,” ESET said in a report.
Rating of Identified Ransomware Samples / Source: ESET.
In the second quarter of 2020, the number of cases of hidden browser mining of cryptocurrencies increased by 163% compared to the previous quarter.
At the end of the first half of 2020, ransomware viruses disappeared from the top threats - they accounted for only 1% of the total number of hacker attacks.