Amateur Cryptojackers and Apple Macs Emerge as Two Mining Malware Trends for 2018

Despite reports from some quarters showing that mining malware detections increased in the first two quarters of 2018, other reports suggest that they have in fact decreased.

While the overall growth in mining malware since last year has been attributed to the volatility of cryptocurrency prices and the existence of software bugs, other factors have played a significant role, such as the involvement of amateur cryptojackers and the cost of mining legitimately.

If there's one dominant trend this year in the underworld of cryptojacking, it's that most mining malware focuses on Monero.

Most notably, cryptojacking is increasingly becoming the province of amateur 'hackers,' who are lured into the illicit activity by the cheap availability of mining malware and by obvious financial rewards.

"Low entry barrier to the illegal mining market results in a situation where cryptocurrency is being mined by people without technical expertise or experience with fraudulent schemes."

McAfee noted in a report from April that the vast majority of its detections were of CoinMiner, a piece of malware that surreptitiously inserts code taken from the CoinHive XMR mining algorithm into the victim's computer.

Things are already bad enough in the present, with the CTA writing that infection by mining malware comes with steep costs for victims.

This, clearly, isn't especially promising, which is a large part of the reason why so many amateurs have turned to cryptojacking, since mining XMR while paying for your own electricity just isn't fruitful when you're not a big mining company.

There are recent signs that Monero mining has become more profitable, even for the smaller miner.

In its Q2 2018 report, Malwarebytes revealed that mining malware detections dropped from a peak of 5 million at the beginning of March, to a low of 1.5 million at the beginning of June.