RiskIQ, the global leader in digital threat management, recently released an infographic mapping and profiling the global cryptocurrency mining landscape, which has swelled in size due to the rush by companies and threat actors alike to capitalise on cryptocurrency's skyrocketing valuation.
The infographic is based on data collected by RiskIQ's web crawling infrastructure, which downloads and analyses website content to identify the individual technical components that load when rendered to detect cryptocurrency miners across the Internet. The research highlights the influx of revenue-generating miners in domains in the Alexa top-10,000 and analyses their attributes, such as prevalence, longevity and associated infrastructure.
Since these miners require an expensive amount of computing power — Fundstrat reported that the cost of mining a single Bitcoin reached about $8,038 and the costs of mining other coins are not far behind — actors often source it from unwitting users. To do so, they take advantage of the fact that security teams lack visibility into all the ways that they can be attacked externally and struggle to understand what belongs to their organisation, how it’s connected to the rest of their asset inventory and what potential vulnerabilities are exposed to compromise.
While some brands capitalise by running cryptocurrency mining scripts in the background of their sites to leverage the computers of their visitors legally, threat actors exploit this blind spot to hack vulnerable sites or spin up fake, illegitimate websites to siphon money, often with typosquatting domains and fraudulent branding. RiskIQ reported back in February that an upwards of 50,000 total websites have been observed using Coinhive in the past year–many of them likely without the original owner’s knowledge.
"In the case of cryptocurrency mining scripts, organisations must be able to inventory all the third-party code running on their web assets and be able to detect instances of threat actors leveraging their brand on illegitimate sites around the Internet,” said Adam Hunt, chief data scientist at RiskIQ. “Threat actors realise the lack of visibility these organisations have and are targeting it accordingly.”
The report found that threat actors leveraging domains or subdomains that belong, or appear to belong, to major brands, trick people into visiting their sites running cryptocurrency mining scripts to monetize their content.
(Source: RiskIQ)
Six out of 10 people with currently no exposure to cryptocurrencies would consider including cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin into their investment portfolios, reveals a new global poll.
Meanwhile, seven out of 10 people who do hold cryptocurrencies are planning to increase their exposure in the next 12 months.
In the survey carried out by deVere Group, 62% of those who do not have any cryptocurrency said ‘yes’, 26% ‘no’, and 12% ‘do not know’ when asked: “Would you consider, or are you considering, including at least one cryptocurrency into your investment portfolio?”
71% of investors who do currently have cryptocurrencies as part of their portfolio said that they are looking to increase this exposure over the next year, 25% said that they would not, and 4% cited that they did not know.
The 800-plus respondents of this poll are deVere clients who currently reside in the US, the UK, Australia, the UAE, Qatar, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Spain, France, Germany and South Africa.
Of the survey, deVere Group’s founder and CEO, Nigel Green, comments: “The fact that more than 60% of people with currently no exposure to cryptocurrencies would consider including them into their investment portfolios is striking.
“It underscores how, despite what many financial traditionalists have opined, that a majority of investors are now open to consider the opportunities that the likes of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple could present.
“An increasing general awareness of cryptocurrencies and how they work, plus a growing sense that cryptocurrency regulation is now inevitable, are perhaps the main reasons why such a high percentage of people are now open to looking at the possibilities of crypto for their portfolios.”
He continues: “The survey also highlights that the majority of those who do currently hold some cryptocurrency as part of their investment portfolio believe that despite ongoing volatility, the potential rewards will outweigh the potential risks.
“It suggests that these investors expect good returns in 2018 from cryptocurrencies, view them as a good longer-term investment, and that the market will eventually stabilise.”
The deVere CEO concludes: “Cryptocurrencies remain a gamble – they are very much ‘unchartered waters’ assets and caution must be exercised. However, that said, I do believe that in today’s digital world, there is a need for digital currencies. One or two of the existing ones will succeed, whether it’s Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Dash, or any of the others, or not, of course remains to be seen.”
(Source: deVere Group)
