Throwback Thursday: Malware taking a bit(coin) more than we bargained for

In late spring of 2011, a sudden rise in the price of

Bitcoin

– reaching almost

US$30, up from less than $1 barely a month earlier –

attracted the attention of malware authors. They added mining capabilities to their malicious creations and made them look for

Bitcoin

wallets, while many websites added JavaScript code that used visitors’ CPUs to mine for

Bitcoin

.

Fluctuating value of BTC in $USD.

The situation is surprisingly similar six and a half years on, as the meteoric rise in value of many cryptocurrencies in late 2017 has once again attracted the attention of malware authors. Though for mining purposes other cryptocurrencies (most notably

Monero

) are more efficient, many of today’s malware campaigns deliver miners, and many compromised websites have visitors’ devices engage in in-browser mining.

A

report

published this week by

Cisco Talos

looked at how extremely profitable such activities can be.

One of the earliest papers that looked at malware families targeting

Bitcoin

was presented at

VB2012

by

Microsoft

researcher Amir Fouda. For this week’s Throwback Thursday, we publish Amir’s paper in both

HTML

and

PDF

format.