Cryptojacking

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

According to SonicWall, a US-based cybersecurity firm’s report, Cryptojacking attacks on computer systems have gone up by 30% to 66.7 million in the first half of 2022 compared to the first half of last year.

Cryptojacking 

• Cryptojacking is a cyber attack wherein a computing device is hijacked and controlled by the attacker, and its resources are used to illicitly mine cryptocurrency.
• In most cases, the malicious programme is installed when the user clicks on an unsafe link, or visits an infected website and unknowingly provides access to their Internet-connected device.

Reasons Behind Cryptojacking

• Coin mining is a legitimate, competitive process used to release new crypto coins into circulation or to verify new transactions. 
• It involves solving complex computational problems to generate blocks of verified transactions that get added to the blockchain. 
• The reward for the first miner who successfully manages to update the crypto ledger through this route is crypto coins.
• But the race to crack this crypto code needs considerable computing power involving state-of-the-art hardware and electrical power to keep the systems involved up and running.
• Cryptojackers co-opt devices, servers and cloud infrastructure, and use their resources for mining. The use of ‘stolen’ or cryptojacked resources slashes the cost involved in mining.

Concerns

• Cryptojacking is hard to detect and the victims of these attacks mostly remain unaware that their systems have been compromised.
• Some telltale signs are the device slowing down, heating up or the battery getting drained faster than usual.