CRIMINALS ARE HIJACKING YOUR COMPUTER TO MINE CRYPTOCURRENCY

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Egyptian internet users who accessed the porn site Babylon-X.com in recent years might’ve noticed their computers slowing down or overheating while taking in the entertainment. It wasn’t because Babylon’s videos were too high-definition, or that there were too many ads stifling the load times.

Nope. The slowdown was actually a result of the Egyptian government secretly hijacking its citizens’ computers “en masse” in order to mine the cryptocurrency monero.

Egypt’s manipulation of its country’s porn users is just one form of the growing trend of cryptojacking, where a computer’s processing power gets co-opted by outside forces (read: hackers) who use the extra computing energy to mine cryptocurrency either purposely or surreptitiously.

The practice has exploded in popularity — among both criminal and legitimate enterprises — in recent months along with the exponential rise in the price of bitcoin and other digital currencies. According to a report by Symantec published last week, there was an 8,500 percent surge in cryptojacking attacks in the final quarter of 2017. Researchers called the surge “a modern-day gold rush for cybercriminals.”
And nearly 25 percent of all attacks were detected in the U.S., which is more than the next three countries combined — Japan (9.4 percent), Germany (6.4 percent) and France (5.9 percent), according to the same report.

Unsurprisingly, criminals have been the quickest to capitalize on the new trend. It began when criminals started hacking millions of PCs and smartphones to plant malware that secretly mined cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. But more recently criminals have turned their attention to hacking websites, where they secretly inject code that captures the processing power of visiting PCs or smartphones, exponentially growing their web of power sources.