Blog / Cryptojacking: A Brief Look at a New Online Threat

In order to effectively communicate with people, it’s important to be able to speak the same “language.” This is true regardless of who you’re speaking to or what you’re talking about. Two botanists debating the best soil composition for growing drought resistant flowers are going to use very different language than two neighbours chatting about their daisies.

Language, however, changes over time. Jargon, which is specialized language used within a specific industry or context, changes very quickly, especially in the world of computers and technology, which are rapidly evolving as well. In other words, computer jargon is always changing and you’re always running into new words or old words that have transformed to mean something new.

Welcome to my world.

Today’s new word, that you may or may not have already been introduced to, is “cryptojacking”. Like juicejacking which we talked about last week, cryptojacking hijacks your device for nefarious reasons. Unlike juicejacking (or most other malware, for that matter), cryptojackers aren’t actually trying to lock you down for ransom or steal your data. They’re not even trying to steal your cryptocurrency coins, although we’re getting closer to the actual core issue.

You see, cryptocurrency coins are basically “mined” by computers doing extraordinarily complex math. That’s an extreme oversimplification, but it works for our purposes. In essence, the more computers you have, the more math you can do, and thus the more coins you can mine. The more coins you can mine, the more you can sell, and the more money you have.

Now the big issue is all the electricity that gets used in the process. Paying for the energy to power all those computers can be expensive. It can often cost more to mine a coin then you get for selling it.

So how do you “fix” that problem?

Solution 1: Be ethical

It’s not a big secret that some places have cheaper electricity then others . Cryptomining operations can setup somewhere electricity is relatively inexpensive, or even build some kind of electrical power generation of your own. Investing some money to make a higher return on your investment would be the ethical approach to cryptomining.

Solution 2: Don’t be ethical

In other words, start cyrptojacking. The goal is simple: steal computing time on other computers. This way you don’t need to pay for the electricity or even the hardware. There are lots of ways that it can potentially be done. Malware can be created to spread like a virus and infect as many computers as possible. Websites can run code in the background. It can be hidden in legitimate or pirated software. And those are just a few of the ways it can happen.

A few seconds is all you really need, as long as you can get them on enough computers. Two seconds on one thousand different computers is a little over half hour of number crunching.

The problem for legitimate businesses is that being cryptojacked can seriously negatively affect productivity by using up their computers’ processing power, making them run slower and in turn slowing employees down. What’s worse is that it because it doesn’t lock you down or crash your system, cryptojacking can be extremely hard to notice. Unless you’re intentionally looking for it, you’re unlikely to even realize you’ve been cryptojacked until you start poking around trying to figure out why everyone in your organization has been just a bit less productive for the last few months. By then it’s too late though; you’ve already lost all that time and productivity to a cryptojacker.

Cyrptojacking is still a relatively new word, but it’s one you’ll likely hear a lot more about in general media going forward.

Shakespeare has a lot to say about language (and even more to say with it). Taking a line from ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’, “They have liv’d long on the alms-basket of words.” Not a bad way to think about the language of computers.

If you have any questions about cryptojacking, please reach out to your TRINUS Account Manager for some stress-free IT.

By Kind, Courtesy of Your Friendly Neighbourhood Cyber-Man.