Cryptocurrency miners are becoming one of the most prolific threats facing everyone from CISOs to consumers, with Check Point Software Technologies naming this type of malicious software to its Ten Most Wanted Malware list for October.
The advent of using Coinhive and its variants to illegally mine bitcoin, monero and other digital currencies helped debut this cryptocurrency miner at number six on Check Point's list, right between the well-known Zeus, at number five, and Ramnit at number seven.
“Cryptomining is emerging as a silent, yet significant, actor in the threat landscape, allowing threat actors to extract substantial profits while victims' endpoints and networks suffer from latency and decreased performance,” Check Point wrote.
CoinHive is implanted via JavaScript, and proceeds to use a huge portion of the victimized computer's CPU power, severely impacting the machine's performance.
Another newcomer to the list was Seamless. This is a traffic distribution system malware, which operates by silently redirecting the victim to a malicious web page, leading to infection by an exploit kit. Successful infection will allow the attacker to download additional malware from the target.
Here is how the rest of the list shook out for October:
1. RoughTed
2. Locky
3. Seamless
4. Conficker
5. Zeus
6. CoinHive
7. Ramnit
8. Fireball
9. Pushdo
10. Andromeda