Ransomware attacks are one of the most common types of online threats that organizations and businesses today face. Crypto-jacking is one such attack and it’s so stealthy that most organizations won’t notice it until it’s too late.
Worst of all, the repercussions of crypto mining malware often take a while to manifest. The first sign is usually the damage done to crypto mining software and the financial impact. This is especially when it comes to dramatically increasing the company’s electric bill or infecting its cloud infrastructure. Not to mention the compromised performance and productivity that comes with your machines being down.
What Can Happen?
An attack of this magnitude can have incredibly detrimental effects for non-crypto CPUs. This is because they’re more susceptible to burn out or get super slow.
It’s important to note that crypto-jacking or crypto-mining malware is at its easy stages. A single attack is usually a precursor to a more sophisticated endeavor by the same cybercriminals. Most of the time, a well-trained neural network is the only way to stop crypto miners in their tracks.
That’s why a lot of security companies are leveraging AI technology as well as machine learning to predict crypto mining malware before it happens.
Network Crypto Mining
Most vendors are able to identify crypto-mining malware from the network level. It’s honestly risky to spot crypto mining at the tail end of an attack. This is because at that point it could already be on an organization’s servers, desktops, laptops and even mobile devices and IoT devices. These attacks can be intentional or unintentional and there’s a broad spectrum of them out there.
The trump card of almost all crypto-mining malware endeavors is the ability to communicate and receive new hashes in order to calculate them. This allows the perpetrator to replace the hashes and place them in their wallet. This basically points to the fact that detecting crypto mining malware requires you to look out for suspicious activity within the network.
The downside is that crypto-mining traffic is incredibly stealthy. This is due to the fact that developers use super short messages and advanced obfuscation techniques. That’s why it’s really tough for most companies to detect it. They struggle to even discover the amount of data that they have on hand.
Technologies Used
Technology such as SecBI’s Autonomous Investigation enables organizations to spot suspicious patterns through the use of machine learning. The great thing about SecBI is that it examines a number of factors including periodic crypto mining traffic to spot any random intervals that malware writers place.
Plus, crypto mining malware is unusually short with long outgoing results. On the other hand, the initial request is typically shorter with a long response. The SecBI technology is compatible with all sorts of public cloud infrastructure as well as in-house networks.
It’s important to note that although 60% of all network traffic is encrypted, you can still spot infections by looking at subtle indicators like message length and communication timing. The SecBI network is just really good at spotting and fighting crypto-mining malware.
Smart Endpoint Crypto Mining
Another method that organizations can use to spot crypto-jacking is to use endpoint protection. Most of the time, cybercriminals instigate their attacks by avoiding network-based defenses. They do this through the use of invisible communication channels and cutting-edge encryption. An easy way to spot crypto mining malware is to go straight for the endpoint. That’s why organizations should keep an eye on their systems to spot any apparent changes and determine whether or not they have an authorization.
Endpoint protection technology acts fast by spotting previously unseen threats. This means that it does more than just prevent known malicious attacks and activity. It can actually detect legitimate-looking software that looks just like what your computers use for their systems.
The ability to detect the scripting language used by attackers is essential in spotting illegitimate use of your own computer’s software. It means being able to prevent your system from turning on itself by improving your ability to spot the attack from afar. This is one of the best ways to stop crypto-mining malware.
Conclusion
Another great way to to stop crypto-mining malware is to use Defencebyte software. We highly recommend you to give it a try and ensure your computer a security layer from all possible threats.
Let us know in the comments down below what you think of this article and how it helped you out!
