Recent malware laden ads that showed up on Yahoo websites wasn’t just infecting vulnerable systems with Trojans, they were also dropping Bitcoin mining software onto victim systems in a bid to create a mining network comprising of millions of PCs, a security company has claimed.
Light Cyber, a security company, which claims to be the first company to detect and protect its customers from Bitcoin mining malware. The company claimed through a press release that its appliances were able to detect the malware threat some four days before the attack became widespread.
According to Light Cyber the perpetrators behind the attacks used vulnerabilities in Java to drop malware, which in turn installed Bitcoin-mining software on some machines. The company estimates that several thousand systems were infected by visiting these ads and the mining software may have been installed on them.
Light Cyber founder and vice president for product and strategy, Giora Engel, to PC Pro “This campaign downloaded a variety of different tools – some were malware to enable attackers to control each infected PC and steal passwords.”
“Other tools were more specific – the Bitcoin mining tool is not malware itself, it’s something anyone can download and generate Bitcoin”, Giora added.
Giora estimates that given the several million machines that could have infected, hackers could have made several thousand pounds a day.
