The miners strike – addressing the crypto-currency threat to enterprise networks
Tracey Caldwell · Computer Fraud & Security · 2018
The proliferation of crypto-currency has led inevitably to high-profile impacts on networks. In February, crypto-mining hackers hit more than 4,000 websites around the world, including UK government websites, the UK student loans company, the US courts and the City University of New York. They inserted Coinhive's Monero miner into every web page offering the Browsealoud plug-in that enables blind and partially sighted people to access web content. 1 Visitors to these websites found themselves inadvertently mining for crypto-currency. The proliferation of crypto-currency has led to high-profile impacts on networks. Crypto-mining presents a number of risks to enterprise networks, ranging from enterprises' websites being hijacked to staff installing coin-mining plugins. Most major crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin can now only be mined using enterprise-level computing power, thus making enterprise networks a juicy target for illicit mining software. At the same time, more recent crypto-currencies such as Monero may still be mined using the CPU power of an individual device – which could be in your corporate network. Tracey Caldwell explores the threats and what can be done about them.