Will Crypto-Miners Overtake Ransomware as a Top Attack in 2018?

With a surge in the price of cryptocurrencies, cybercriminals are starting to turn to mining attacks to reap the rewards.

This is evident in the recent attack on an estimated 5,000 web servers this week, including government websites in the U.S. and U.K.:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/11/government-websites-hit-by-cryptocurrency-mining-malware

The affected sites attempted to infect visitors with malware that would turn the end users computer into a digital miner of the cryptocurrency, Monero.  The infected machines' resources and bandwidth are utilized, while the cybercriminal gets all the profits.

Some industry experts are predicting that Crypto-miners could actually become more prevalent than ransomware, as the payoffs are becoming more lucrative.

We are recommending the basics to help fight this, such as: keeping patches updated, keeping AV updated, remove local admin from all machines, user awareness training, etc.

But we are also recommending that network and system administrators keep an eye out for spikes in system resource use, like CPU and bandwidth.