Ransomware continues to attack companies, businesses, enterprises, organizations and others. But since the interest of cryptocurrency exploded, those entities are experiencing cryptojacking attacks much more often.
Mining cryptocurrencies involve a lot of computing power and electricity. While some websites "ask" visitors's permission for CPU power, a lot of websites never say anything. Their alleged miners, intentionally put or not, run in the background to steal people's CPU power without their consent.
Enterprise environments are targets for such attacks due to them using more expensive and high-powered computing systems that most end users.
Related: Bitcoin Mining Consumes More Electricity Than 159 Countries In The World
RedLock's Cloud Security Trends report suggest that up to 25 percent of businesses and organizations have at least experienced one cryptojacking activity in 2018. In comparison, Q1 2017 was only 8 percent.
"One possible explanation for this is the ransomware market is becoming saturated and overpriced, and hackers are setting their sights on new revenue streams," the report says. "Another reason cryptojacking continues to proliferate is that attackers are using advanced evasion techniques when mining cryptocurrencies."
There are many factors that make cryptojacking possible. From exploited cloud environment to experienced and knowledgeable threat actors, to insecure databases and so forth.
While people are doing better in protecting their systems in 2018, there is still a huge room for improvements that haven't been covered.
According to the researchers, there are about 49 percent databases in the cloud that aren't encrypted, 43 percent of companies don't change their access key, 51 percent of companies publicly expose at least one cloud storage device, etc..
RedLock said that businesses which don't employ patch processes are also vulnerable to attacks. The researchers suggest that 24 percent of organizations are experiencing high-severity vulnerability patches in public cloud environments.
RedLock also uncovered a new attack vector relating to enterprise public cloud environments caused by public cloud instance metadata APIs.
"We understand why there might be fatigue with endless reports on IT infrastructures that lack adequate security, and there are signs that corporations are stepping up initiatives to minimize vulnerabilities, but there's definitely more to do," explained Gaurav Kumar, CTO of RedLock. "That's why this report not only shines a light on emerging dangers but also offers concrete advice on how best to ward off attacks."
"Cloud computing environments bring tremendous flexibility and great economies of scale, but those advantages are meaningless without top-level security," added the executive. "This is a constant and shared responsibility."
