Symantec Corporation (NASDAQ:SYMC) Says Low Barrier To Entry Have Led To Huge Rise In Illicit Cryptojacking

Symantec Corporation (NASDAQ:SYMC), a leading security firm has said that the huge rise in the popularity of cryptocurrencies is mostly due to the low barrier to entry. It has ultimately resulted in 8,500% spike in coin mining scripts, also called cryptojacking.

The second half of 2017 saw an explosive growth in the interest for cryptocurrencies which ultimately resulted in an increase in cryptojacking. The Californian firm has said that the rise in the interest in cryptocurrencies was such that the number of coin miners on endpoint computers went up by 8,500% in 2017. In its report on the topic of Cyber Security Threat Landscape, Symantec has said that the low barrier to entry for coin mining is the real reason for the rise in the incidences of cryptojacking.

Incidentally, users only require a few lines of code to carry on the operation of coin mining thereby making the overall scenario vulnerable to cybercrime. The report from the cybersecurity software company says that the low requirement for getting an entry to start coin mining allows criminals to spread their network without getting under the radar.

Bad Actors Within The Pool Became Aggressive Miners

The scripts of coinminers are used for generating new coins through computer networks that are run on nodes. These are also called as bitcoin mining farms. Individually, you can also run bitcoin mining machines at your place. The statistics released by the antivirus software manufacturer are relevant to the mining of cryptocurrencies that were carried out on such bitcoin mining machines or mining farms.

Since the requirement for entering into the arena is quite low, bad actors in the pool started scripting the coins using the computers of end users without taking their permissions. The biggest example is that of Monero, a malware that made a good amount of profit using the systems of other users for mining the coins.

Rise In Illicit Coin Mining Alarming

The figure of 8,500% released by Symantec is just an indication how coin mining is favoring the cybercrime. On a global scale, more such issues have come to the fore. The coin mining spiked 10,000% in the last quarter of 2017 in Sweden whereas the Kaspersky Lab representative Yaroslava Ryabova recently reported that the cyber criminals have managed to generate an amount of more than $7 million just by using coin mining scripts of the users in mere six months.

The hackers have even sabotaged the cloud accounts of big companies like Ello Musk’s Tesla Company whose Amazon account was used by the cyber criminals for crypto mining.