Citrix survey: Crypto mining is the new trend in cyber crime

In a new survey published by Citrix, almost 60 percent of organisations informed that they have discovered mining malware on their systems, with around 80 percent reported to have noticed it in the past six months.

As reported by Coindesk, in one third of the reported cases, the network monitoring software could discover the malware and similar number of other cases were reported by the company employees themselves. However, the other intrusions could be identified only after the speed of the devices became very slow.

A new form of crypto-jacking is spreading across companies in countries like India, Brazil, Colombia and Turkey according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs. This system of hijacking the corporate network will enable the miner to infect both - workstations and servers.

Ransomware was more popularly used by cyber criminals till last year, however, illegal miners have now become more popular and make for about 32 percent of all the malware attacks.

According to the research, 60 percent of the companies affected by the malware said that less than 50 systems had been infected, while one tenth of the companies complained that over 100 machines were affected by the illegal mining code, as reported by the ZDNet.

Another security firm, Trustwave reported an attack this month, majorly in Brazil that targets MicroTik routers and leads to the installation of the Coinhive mining software on aver 17,000 devices.