According to a security report released by Microsoft, over 80,000 computers running on different versions of the Windows Operating system were found mining bitcoins without the knowledge of the users.
Dubbed as Dexphot, the malware has been reportedly infecting Win machines since Oct’18 stealing the computing power of its machines to mine bitcoins.
Technologically, bitcoins mining happens when computers do humongous amounts of calculations and get rewarded by a bitcoin on successful completion of the calculation string.
Researchers found that Dexphot malware is sophisticated enough to reinstall itself on an incremental note to remain for long on the computers to mine Bitcoins. And has the tendency to get customized and used as a botnet to launch DDoS cyber attacks to overload servers with web traffic and imperil IT infrastructures of public and private entities.
“It is one of the countless malware which is being used for Cryptocurrency Mining silently stealing the processing power and earning Bitcoins for hackers without the knowledge of the victim.
However, the good news is that the infection is seen spreading widely across Win 8,7 and XP machines and not the Windows 10 operating system run machine”, says Hazel Kim, malware analysts working for Microsoft Defender ATP Research.
Kim claims that Microsoft is working hard to mitigate such risks with countermeasures and has so far attained super-success in doing so. However, a lot of works needs to be done to attain a full count on this note.
The post Over 80K computers running on Microsoft Windows OS found generating bitcoins with Malware appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.
November 27, 2019 at 10:50AM
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