Kaspersky Labs latest report suggests that Cyber Crooks are turning to crypto jacking from ransomware attacks and that’s due to the fact that the former is proving more profitable than the latter.
The report compiled by the Russian Cybersecurity firm suggests that the total number of users who encountered ransomware has fallen by around 30 % from nearly 2.6 million in between 2016-2017 to around 2 million in 2017-2018.
Although the figures suggest that the said cybercrime variant has dipped phenomenally in the past couple of years, the stats also strongly suggest that the dip is not due to the fact that the hackers have lost interest in the cybercrime but instead they have started searching for more profitable means such as cyptojacking.
Kaspersky study said that the people who were targeted by encryptors have fallen by 3% to 41.5% in 2017-18 while compared to the previous year. But at the same time, the crypto mining software spreading crime rate has risen by almost 44.5 %. For instance, the report suggests that in the year 2016, around 400,000 PCs were targeted by crypto mining hackers. But the numbers rose to 600,000 in 2017 which is alarming.
Kaspersky Labs also suggests that users who were attacked by mobile miners have increased by 9.5% from 4,505 in 2016-17 to 4,931 in 2017-18.
The study conducted by the researchers from the Russian cybersecurity firm also suggests that mobile mining is emerging threat targeting developing countries like India, and China. They believe that the two nations are now the key targets for criminals as they account for around a 3rd of all smartphones in the world.
