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How Constant Monitoring Can Prevent Cryptojacking Attacks

How Constant Monitoring Can Prevent Cryptojacking Attacks

How Constant Monitoring Can Prevent Cryptojacking Attacks
We’ve written about cryptojacking and how to stay safe from these attacks, but people don’t seem to learn. When the news dropped about Tesla’s cryptojacking, it was clear that the problem was user based. Symantec’s recent Internet Security Threat Report goes into detail about the growing problem of cryptojacking.

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The growing cryptocurrency problem

Bitcoin has been a topic of discussion across the business world. Both people who know blockchain and people who know the stock market have a love-hate relationship with Bitcoin. Today (it’ll likely be different tomorrow), Bitcoin is sitting around $6,000. This is up from almost nothing a few years ago, and down from almost $20,000 a few months ago.

Regardless of its success or failure, Bitcoin is huge, and people are obsessed with it. Recent ransomware attacks have asked for Bitcoin as payment. These attacks are targeting hospitals, cities, major airlines, etc.

Cryptojacking explained

Cryptojacking is another method that hackers/crypto miners use to obtain Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This is done by taking over a cloud platform. Cloud platforms have tremendous amounts of computing power, enough to mine Bitcoin. Symantec says that Bitcoin is incredibly difficult to mine on a home computer.

According to Symantec’s research, “Coinminers made up 24 percent of all web attacks blocked in December 2017, and 16 percent of web attacks blocked in the last three months.”

Symantec points out that this is a less disruptive way for cybercriminals to make money. The victims don’t notice immediately, which was the case for Tesla and other companies.

Tesla’s attack was highly preventable, as was the case for other victims. Tesla didn’t believe having a password on their Kubernetes administration console was necessary, for some reason. Through this, crypto miners were able to infiltrate their AWS account to mine cryptocurrency using the cloud’s computing power. Cloud security is essential to maintaining the safety of your enterprise’s information, and obviously, that starts with having a password.

Constant monitoring

These attacks can go on for months at a time without anyone noticing. Enterprises are apparently overlooking the importance of monitoring. Network monitoring solutions can help you discover normal user behavior, and it can recognize when someone is using a large amount of computing power to crypto mine. Hackers are coming through the cloud, IoT devices, and any other vulnerability, monitoring is more important than ever.

Beyond telling you about an outage, network performance monitoring tools are also able to tell you the root cause of the outage. End-users may have a moment of instability in their network, but the proper response plan allows you to repair the problem as quickly as possible. Some tools even tell you the best methods to repair an outage.

Prevention is the best defense. Building your network based on user analytics allows you to have the optimal experience for your users. It makes sense to build your network based on your users. Don’t let your network slow your business, or your users down.

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