Edx Threat Detection: Planning for a Secure Enterprise: Cryptocurrency mining

Cryptocurrency mining

Another type of attack which recently started gaining more popularity due to dramatic increase in monetary value of Bitcoin is currency mining. Bitcoin mining constitutes a special class of software that uses mining algorithms to generate or “mine” bitcoin digital currency. Mining software is often flagged as malicious because it hijacks system hardware resources like the Central Processing Unit (CPU) or Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) as well as network bandwidth of an affected host. Bitcoin miners propagate through a variety of techniques including malicious downloads, emails with malicious links, attachments downloaded by already-installed malware, and peer to peer file sharing networks. This type of system hijacking is one of the many ways to exploit unsuspecting users by utilizing their system’s computing resources for a financial profit. Once a machine is infected, a downloaded cryptocurrency miner silently carries out mining operations without the user’s consent.


https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:Microsoft+INF249x+2T2018/course/