CRYPTOJACKING RISING THREAT TO CYBER AND PERSONAL SECURITY

Symantec’s latest Internet Security Threat report has listed cryptojacking, a form of cyber attack that hijacks a target’s CPU processing power in order to mine cryptocurrency, as a highly profitable new revenue stream for cyber criminals as ransomware market has become overpriced and overcrowded.

“Cryptojacking is a rising threat to cyber and personal security,” said David Rajoo, director, systems engineering, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines, Symantec.

“The massive profit incentive puts people, devices and or- ganizations at risk of unauthorized coin miners siphoning resources from their systems, further motivating criminals to infiltrate everything from home PCs to giant data centers.”

During the past year, an astronomical rise in cryptocurrency values triggered a cryptojacking gold rush with cyber criminals attempting to cash in on a volatile market. Detections of coinminers on endpoint computers increased by 8,500 percent in 2017. Philippines ranks 11th in the Asia-Pacific Japan (APJ) region, 35th globally in terms of crypto mining activities.

With a low barrier of entry – only requiring a couple lines of code to operate – cyber criminals are harnessing stolen processing power and cloud CPU usage from consumers and enterprises to mine cryptocurrency.

Coinminers can slow devices, overheat batteries, and in some cases, render devices unusable. For enterprise organizations, coinminers can put corporate networks at risk of shutdown and inflate cloud CPU usage, adding cost.

“Now you could be fighting for resources on your phone, computer or IoT device as attacks use them for profit,” said Rajoo. “People need to expand their defenses or they will pay for the price for someone else using their device.”

IoT devices continue to be ripe targets for exploitation. Symantec found a 600 percent increase in overall IoT attacks in 2017, which means that cyber criminals could exploit the connected nature of these devices to mine en masse.

Macs are not immune either with Symantec detecting an 80 percent increase in coin mining attacks against Mac OS. By leveraging browser-based attacks, criminals do not need to download malware to a victim’s Mac or PC to carry out cyber attacks.

The number of targeted attack groups is on the rise with Symantec now tracking 140 organized groups. Last year, 71 percent of all targeted attacks started with spear phishing to infect their victims. As targeted attack groups continue to leverage tried and true tactics to infiltrate organizations, the use of zero-day threats is falling out of favor. Only 27 percent of targeted attack groups have been known to use zero-day vulnerabilities at any point in the past.

Symantec identified a 200 percent increase in attackers injecting malware implants into the software supply chain in 2017. That’s equivalent to one attack every month as compared to four attacks the previous year. Hijacking software updates provides attackers with an entry point for compromising well-guarded networks.

Threats in the mobile space continue to grow year-overyear. Symantec blocked an average of 24,000 malicious mobile applications each day last year.

The profitability of ransomware led to a crowded market. In 2017, the market made a correction, lowering the average ransom cost to $522 and signaling that ransomware has become a commodity.