For many, it is no longer news that computers and servers of private and home ones are used as an additional resource for miners - earners of cryptocurrencies.
Evgeny Lopatin (an analyst at Kaspersky Lab) explains: “The cybercriminals, as always, use any opportunity to make a profit by illegal means, and the ways of making money are constantly evolving. The development of the cryptocurrency market has opened up new opportunities for cybercriminals, but in order to use them to the fullest, they need the power of someone else's equipment. And this, in turn, contributed to a rapid increase in the number of cases when miners are installed without the knowledge of users. This boom in hidden mining is partly due to the fact that at the stage of the emergence of the cryptocurrency market, mining and making money on it is much easier. "
LK reports that in August 2021, about 9,000 computers were discovered that were infected with viruses for mining cryptocurrencies. The pirate mining network brings its owners up to $ 30 thousand in profit per month.
Today, the most popular cryptocurrencies among pirate miners are Monero (XMR) and Zcash.
Miners prioritize very good computers that have a graphics video card and a powerful processor. Miner viruses directly use the technical capacities of the captured computer - this greatly reduces the speed of work and increases energy consumption. Games such as World of Tanks, GTA 5, Dota, Minecraft and others may freeze.
The uniqueness of the virus lies in the fact that it directly uses the resources of the computer. Thus, not all antivirus programs are capable of detecting pirated malware. A virus gets on a computer when updating software under the pretext of renewing a license, downloading activation keys, etc.
LK specialists note that absolutely any user can legally install a special program for himself and mine cryptocurrencies. The mining process itself is quite legal.
It is quite easy to independently check the loading of the video card - this can be done using the GPU-Z (Graphics processing unit) utility. You need to run the program and it will show how the resources of the video card are used.
