Miners are a class of malware whose popularity has grown substantially this year. The actual process of cryptocurrency mining is perfectly legal, though there are groups of people who hoodwink unwitting users into installing mining software on their computers, or exploiting software vulnerabilities to do so. This results in threat actors receiving cryptocurr

Let us discuss what defines the profitability of bitcoin mining, what principles for mining speed adaptation were initially embedded into it, and why these principles can lead to the failure of the cryptocurrency in the long run. We assume that the reader has an idea of basic Bitcoin mechanics such as blockchains, mining, mining pools, and block rewards. Not

“You FOOL! This isn’t even my final form!” In one of our previous articles, we analyzed the NeutrinoPOS banker as an example of a constantly evolving malware family. A week after publication, this Neutrino modification delivered up a new malicious program classified by Kaspersky Lab as Trojan-Banker.Win32.Jimmy. NeutrinoPOS vs Jimmy The au

Not long ago, news appeared online of a younger sibling for the sensational vulnerability EternalBlue. The story was about a new vulnerability for *nix-based systems – EternalRed (aka SambaCry). This vulnerability (CVE-2017-7494) relates to all versions of Samba, starting from 3.5.0, which was released in 2010, and was patched only in the latest versions of

On 28 October, the cryptocurrency world saw the emergence of a new player, the Zcash (ZEC) cryptocurrency. Its developers have described it rather figuratively: “If Bitcoin is like HTTP for money, Zcash is HTTPS.” They continue by noting that “unlike Bitcoin, Zcash transactions can be shielded to hide the sender, the recipient and value of

Some months ago we wrote a blog post about CoinVault. In that post we explained how we tore the malware apart in order to get to its original code and not the obfuscated one. So when were contacted recently by the National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) of the Netherlands' police and the Netherlands' National Prosecutors Office, who had obtained a database fr

Kaspersky Lab and INTERPOL recently presented research on how blockchain-based cryptocurrencies could be abused through the pollution of public decentralized databases with arbitrary data.  During our presentation at the BlackHat Asia conference in Singapore, we demonstrated the proof-of-concept using the Bitcoin network, but it's important to under