What Is Cryptojacking?
Cryptojacking is a type of malware that may hide in your computer hard disk and steals its resources (CPU, RAM, Internet bandwidth) in order to mine a digital currency. It involves an unauthorized use of victim’s devices like personal computers, laptops, smartphones or tablets to mine crypto currency. The program is designed in such a way that there is no user input requirement and it runs hiddenly in your computer.
Cryptojacking has become one the most common forms of malware as it uses the computing resources without consent of the user and yields constant income for the hacker in the form of cryptocurrencies.
We will look at the ways on how to spot a Cryptojacking attack and how to prevent it.
How Cryptojacking Works
Cryptojacking attack is easy to implement. For example you visit a website on you browser and a malware script start runing in the background. The coding in these scripts are to use your computer resources to mine a cryptocurrency and send it to the hackers wallet. Usually this attack is done through the browsers which executes and run a code to silently use your computer energy.
How to Spot A Cryptojacking Attack
There are many websites which do not have any ads on the site but they generate revenue from cyyptojacking. Its hard to spot such sites but you may feel that you computer is slow even though you have no high processor task runing on your computer.
Another common method is the phishing attacks which can be used to run a mining script on your computer. You may get a phishing email and once you click on it, the cryptomining software is loaded in your system and it always get activate when your computer is ON and is connected to the interent.
You may close all programs and check through Performance Manager if your computer is high on CPU even when there is no load on the system. This is the most common sign that you are infected with a cryptojacking script.
How to Prevent CryptoJacking
Luckily, we have some free browser extentions like minerBlock for chrome and NoCoin for both chrome and firefox, which will not let your browser mine any cryptocurrency.
Also another way to prevent cryptojacking is not to install anything from any untrsuted website. Usually many softwares are free to download on different sites but the have hidden malwares which get installed in your sytem to perform activities which you never know and CryptoJacking is most common of them.
Always use the latest version of Anti-Virus softwares and keep it updated. Weekly schedule a full anti-virus and anti malware scan on your computer. This will help to get rid of all the viruses and malwares on you system.