Weekly News Roundup

Too busy working all week to keep up with the most interesting stories coming out of the technology and security industries? Below are our recommendations for a roundup of the top stories happening now that you need to know.

Equifax data breach affected 2.4 million more consumers

The 2017 Equifax data breach has expanded again, with the company announcing last week that another 2.4 million U.S. consumers had their information stolen. Read more…

Massive Coin-Mining Attempt Targets Nearly Half a Million PCs

Microsoft has averted a massive and widespread campaign that would have seen tens of thousands of machines impacted. The software giant reported that on March 6, "Windows Defender AV blocked more than 80,000 instances of several sophisticated Trojans that exhibited advanced cross-process injection techniques, persistence mechanisms and evasion methods." Read more…

DDoS Record Broken Again as Memcached Attack Hits 1.7 Tbps

Days after a massive 1.35 Tbps DDoS attack against GitHub, an even larger attack reported at 1.7 Tbps by Netscout Arbor emerges to become the largest DDoS yet. Read more…

Code for massive 'Memcrashed' DDoS attack made public

You, too, can now attempt a record-setting denial-of-service attack, as the tools used to launch the attacks were publicly posted to GitHub this week. Proof-of-concept code by Twitter user @037 combined with a list of 17,000 IP addresses of vulnerable memcached servers allows anyone to send forged UDP packets to memcached servers obtained from the Shodan.io computer search engine. Read more…

BOHH Breakdown Part 22: Inside Cryptojacking - What Is It and Why It's So Popular

In our last post, we talked about the hot topic of cryptocurrency and how to better protect your investments. This week we will continue the cryptocurrency topic and take a closer look at one type of attack – cryptojacking (what it is and why it is becoming so popular).

To understand the concept of cryptojacking, we first must address how it’s possible. Cryptocurrencies such as the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum are not created by a central bank like regular money, but are instead created or mined by distributed computing resources solving complex equations. This means a big cost of mining new coins is electricity. As such, cryptojacking has become popular to avoid this issue and involves passing the electricity cost off of mining to an unsuspecting user. It works by slipping a mining component without the knowledge of users on to devices or websites and harvesting power off of those to steal cryptocurrency digital cash.

What are the methods?

The most popular methods to carry out a cryptojacking attack include in-browser cryptojacking where a JavaScript code lives in the browser. When a user visits a page where the JavaScript code is already embedded, it is then activated in the background and consuming resources without the user knowing; The other is server access to install a attack. This is where an attacker finds and exploits an existing vulnerability and deploys a full-scale cryptocurrency miner on a system.

Why Is This a Cybersecurity Risk?

What makes cryptojacking so tricky is that you’re paying for electricity and stress on your hardware without realizing it, without approving it. Because it’s clandestine, you don’t know whether cryptojacking stops when you leave the website or whether they’ve placed a cookie that will carry on once you’ve navigated away.

While there is no immediate way to tell if a website page you are using or device has a hidden mining component on it, there are some ad blockers and website plugins coming out. However, if you want to keep yourself fully protected, the best way to prevent it at the moment is pulling the plug on your network and turning off your computer. The risk is yours!

Today was the last BOHH Breakdown, but not the last blog. We will continue our blogging on a weekly basis and will have a diverse set of thought pieces coming from our team of experts. Thank you for coming back each week to read our BOHH Breakdown and we look forward to continuing to deliver interesting thought pieces for our readers.