Crypto jacking is the unauthorized utilization of another user’s computer to mine cryptocurrency. Offenders manage to do this by getting the victim to click a malicious link in an email which contains the loaded crypto-mining code on the computer. Another way is by infecting an online ad with JavaScript code that gets automatically executed once loaded in the victim’s browser. An independent cybersecurity firm presented a recent internet security report that highlighted the increasing threat of crypto-malware.

According to the report, within the first few months of 2018 itself, almost every known variants of Linux downloader malware were modeled to cater a cryptocurrency miner on Linux devices. In another latest report published by WatchGuard technologies, the rising threat of cryptocurrency miners may eventually emerge as one of the most dominant forms of malware attack in the upcoming years.

It was seen in the report that as much as 98.8 percent of malware implements a script which downloads and launches a Linux-based crypto miner. It also shows how a script forces Linux devices to download and run a Monero Miner that ends up exhausting the device’s processing power. The report has based its findings on threat intelligence that has been collected from a network of almost 40,000 active threat management devices deployed around the world.

A major reason for the rapid increase of crypto jacking is because cyber criminals can easily make more in a very short span of time. They see cypto jacking as a cheaper and more profitable option to ransomware. A cybercriminal can get many users to pay for every 100 infected devices and with cryptocurrency, all of those 100 infected systems work for the hacker to mine cryptocurrency.