What is Cryptojacking?

In the era of technology and digitalization, people are eager to do shopping and financial transactions online. Crytocurrencies come into play with this.

What is Cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency is a combination of ‘cryptography’ and ‘currency’ which gives the meaning of electronic money based on the principles of cryptography. Cryptocurrencies come as an alternative to traditional money. They do not exist physically and are the forms of digital money. Bitcoin is one of the earliest forms of cryptocurrency and people tend to use cryptocurrencies to sell, buy and make investments due to the easiness in using them.

Cyber criminals are committing malicious activities in all kinds of digital systems and networks. So obviously, cryptocurrencies get the attention of attackers. Cryptojacking is one such way of attacking through the use of cryptocurrencies.

What is Cryptojacking?

Cryptojacking is unauthorized access of smart devices to mine cryptocurrency. Cyber criminals use computing power and resources from the victim’s devices for cyptocurrency mining or for stealing cryptocurrencies from unsuspected victims.

How Cryptojacking Works?

One way is sending a link or an attachment via email. When the recipient click on the link or the attachment, the cryptomining code is loaded to the device. After that, the crypto miner can use the network resources to mine around.

Another way is drive-by cryptomining. A JavaScript code is embedded to a website and the code get activated the mining process when someone visits the webpage. This targets a wider audience compared to malware-based mining techniques.

No matter what technique they use for cryptojacking, the victims do not notice most of the times as the cryptojacking software is running in the background and is designed to be hidden from the victims. The victim may witness a slowdown of the computer, overheating of the device, increased processor usage and increase in the electricity bills.

How to Protect Yourself from Cryptojacking?

As with any other cyber-attack, it is better to instate security before you become a victim.

Drive-by cryptomining is delivered through websites. Therefore, installing ad-blocking and anti-cryptomining extensions on web browsers is one way of preventing cryptojacking. There are ad-blockers such as ‘AdBlock Plus’ and anti-cryptomining extensions such as ‘minerBlock’ and ‘Anti Miner’ for this purpose. These kind of extensions are available in each browser.

Another way is implementing network system monitoring to detect excessive utilization of resources. Keeping the systems updated also can protect you up to a certain extent.

Also, you can use more comprehensive cybersecurity programs. This enables you to protect your devices not just from cryptojacking.

Learning and adapting is the best way to prevent any kind of cyber-attack. Understanding how the attackers have advanced and taking preventive actions on your devices is the best option you have.

Cyber-attacks are evolving day by day and it is not easy to stay safe. We need more advanced and sophisticated approaches to prevent those. We should take actions to prevent unauthorized intrusions and we should find the root-cause whenever we are being attacked to bring the repeat attacks to an end.

Watch this video to see what cryptojacking is: