Miners in your office

[harlan4096]

As you may have heard, mining on your own resources is not the most profitable business. It is risky to invest in home mining farms, and no one really wants to pay for the electricity. Therefore, mining adepts increasingly try to use someone else’s equipment for it.

The damage from their actions is obvious. First, the equipment overheats, and therefore breaks down faster. Second, constant lags slow business processes. Finally, why should you pay someone else’s electricity bills?

Methods of mining on someone else’s equipment

Let’s leave aside for the moment extreme incidents such as the recent one in China in which a local resident laid a cable along the floor of fishponds and stole electricity for mining directly from an oil-producing plant. Yes, that’s a problem, but it’s in the realm of physical security, not informational. Without going into details on the specific tools, miners employ one of three methods to reappropriate resources for cryptomining:

Web mining

All attackers need to do to rope in your resources is run a malicious process in your browser, so Web mining is naturally quite widespread. Usually the crooks inject malicious scripts into frequently visited sites or into advertisement banners and then use computer resources for their own enrichment.

It is unlikely that someone will use Web mining against a particular company. However, your employees can go to a benign website and unwittingly provide attackers with the means to access your resources. Last year, for example, advertising banners with mining scripts were spotted on YouTube.

Malicious mining

A malware infection is hardly news, these days. Except this time, the intruders aren’t encrypting or stealing data, just quietly mining cryptocurrency. And with the only indicator being a drop in computer performance, the infection can remain hidden for a long time.

The means of infection are standard: phishing e-mails and links, software vulnerabilities, and so on. Sometimes attackers infect servers, which increases their profits (and your losses). Sometimes they manage to infect information kiosks and electronic scoreboards, where miners can work for years without attracting any attention.

Continue Reading