A big cryptojacking attack took place first time in the country last month. The target was the Aditya Birla Group – one of India’s largest business conglomerates headquartered at Mumbai.
2000 plus computers were infected by cyber criminals for cryptojacking – a cyber attack where hackers misuse the victim’s terminals and exploit their processing power to mine crypto currency.
An Aditya Birla group spokesperson told Economic Times: “Aditya Birla Group has advance threat management systems that are constantly monitoring and protecting business critical applications and infrastructure in all Businesses. Recently, the advance threat detection systems of our Group alerted us of suspicious activity on some desktop systems. Based on this, our internal team immediately carried out an investigation and deployed countermeasures to isolate and eliminate the cause of this activity. This has resulted in limiting its spread. We also ascertained that there was no data loss due to this activity. As an added assurance, we initiated a detailed forensic investigation which is nearing conclusion in respect of root cause analysis and preventive actions”.
Cryptojacking attacks are very different than the regular ransomware or data threat attacks. In these attacks hackers use victim’s machines for mining cryptocurrencies. Hackers perform the necessary computations to create crypto currency’s blockchains, create new tokens and generate heavy fees in the process. These new tokens and the fees created in the process are deposited to the hackers wallets while the cost of power and hardware wear outs are borne by the victim.
This attack was first detected overseas about a month ago and it was soon spread among other machines in the network across the globe belonging to the Aditya Birla business. Businesses having huge networks of thousands of machines are the ideal targets for such types of attack. The currency mined in this attack was Monero – virtually untraceable and more anonymous than Bitcoin. Also Bitcoin mining has become difficult due to huge demand and random speculation whereas Monero is still under the radar.
Companies are being more cautious with the new cryptojacking attacks and working hard to prevent them. Google recently announced that it would ban all the Chrome extensions involved in such cryptocurrency mining secretly or openly from Chrome browser. Logix Infosecurity helps your organization deploy best tools to keep your company safe on the internet. We help you design a smart disaster recovery plan exactly suitable for your business requirements. It is always good to be prepared than regret later.
