By Lily Hay Newman
Cybersecurity can feel like a chaotic free-for-all sometimes, but it’s not every day that a whole new conceptual type of attack crops up. Over the last 15 months, though, cryptojacking has been exactly that. It’s officially everywhere, and it’s not going away.
The concept of cryptojacking is pretty simple: An attacker finds a way to harness the processing power of computers she doesn’t own—or pay the electric bills on—to mine cryptocurrency for herself. Malicious mining malware has lurked for a while, but attackers didn’t realize its full potential until a group called Coinhive created a simple mining module in September 2017 that could embed in virtually any website.
Once it’s there, anyone who goes to the page will contribute CPU cycles to mining for the module’s owner for however long they have the tab open. Coinhive has said that it intended for the tool to provide an alternate revenue stream for websites, but criminals quickly realized that they could find and exploit vulnerabilities in all sorts of highly trafficked sites to quietly implant their own cryptojacking modules.
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