How CryptoCurrency Mining Can Burn Your Business: what is it and how does it affect you?
CryptoCurrency First
Most people have heard of Bitcoin, the best known cryptocurrency, as its price soared spectacularly in December 2017 and then plunged in January. But how do you generate these digital coins? Basically your computer mines digital currency by solving problems. This uses a lot of hardware resources and Bitcoin requires expensive graphic cards.
CryptoCurrency is unregulated, uninsured and reasonably private. The government won’t know if you are mining (but if you claim it as income, they will tax you on it). Your hydro company will know as it also requires a ton of electricity.
For a much longer and more technical explanation, trust Wikipedia on Cryptocurrency. Don’t Google it because there are a lot of web scams around cryptocurrency.
What is CryptoCurrency Mining?
It didn’t take the scammers long to figure out how to fool other people into mining their coins for them. Cryptominers put mining software on computers, servers, mobile devices, websites, SCADA infrastructure and Cloud servers.
Cryptomining malware overtook ransomware as the largest family of crapware in the world in the first six months of this year. The worst ones are Coinhive, Cryptoloot and JSECOIN.
How CryptoCurrency Mining Can Burn Your Business
The threat is two fold. First, you can get crytocurrency mining software on your business devices. The mining software drains batteries, CPU resources and overheats devices.
You can literally set your laptop on fire.
So far Apple has been the most proactive and completely locked out any crypto program from running on iPhones and iPads. Most antivirus and antimalware software try to block known variants. However the scammers are good at tricking folks into installing this stuff.
And not just scammers. Some legitimate web sites such as Salon.com are asking readers to let them use their computers to mine Monero coins to make up for lost ad revenue.
Second, hackers can install cryptominers on your company web site. Your customers and potential clients can get their devices infected from visiting your web site. Your company could be liable for damages done to their equipment and you’ll have an expensive web site cleanup bill to boot. The best protection from this is to keep your web site fully up to date. That means the latest version of WordPress, up to date theme and plugins, slap on a free security plugin like Wordfence and lots of offsite backups.
Don’t let cryptocurrency miners burn your business.
