The rise of crypto-mining malware has become a significant threat to global organizations, with Check Point reporting a more than doubling in affected organizations from the second half of 2017 to the first six months of 2018. The Cyber Attack Trends: 2018 Mid-Year Report revealed that the figure rose from just under 21% to 42%, resulting in cyber-criminals making an estimated $2.5 billion over the past six months.
According to the report, those behind the trend are becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they spread crypto-mining malware. While website compromises were once the main threat vector, infections can now occur through various channels such as Facebook Messenger, YouTube ads, and Google Play apps.
The report stated, “Crypto-miners today target anything that could be perceived as being in their way. As a result, we have witnessed crypto-miners targeting SQL Databases, industrial systems, a Russian nuclear plant, and even cloud infrastructure. Crypto-miners have also highly evolved recently to exploit high-profile vulnerabilities and to evade sandboxes and security products in order to expand their infection rates.”
In H1 2018, the top three most common malware variants were all crypto-miners, highlighting the prevalence of this type of threat. Additionally, hackers are increasingly targeting cloud storage and infrastructure for both crypto-mining attacks and data theft. Weak passwords for cloud accounts and freely available credentials on public source code repositories are contributing factors to these attacks.
Check Point reported that 51% of organizations worldwide have experienced cloud-based attacks in the past year. Furthermore, there has been an increase in cross-platform malware due to the growing number of consumer-connected devices and the rise of non-Windows operating systems in the market.
As organizations continue to face evolving cyber threats, it is crucial for them to prioritize cybersecurity measures and implement strong security practices to safeguard their data and assets from malicious actors.