Cryptojacking is increasing at a Rapid Pace in India: Banbreach Report

By Chetna Phour

According to a recent report by Banbreach, in last month, the number of compromised routers by cryptojacking software has almost doubled in India.

Banbreach is an Indian security company which provides cybersecurity and privacy as a service to household and small enterprises. Its recent report is showing that there is a significant increase in the number of routers which are affected by the cryptojacking software in India.  Cryptojacking is an illegal act of mining cryptos by using someone else’s computer without authorization. Cryptojacking is one of the most popular ways for bad actors to extract money from targets in form of cryptos.

According to the report, hackers have cracked over 30,000 routers within the country, Hard Fork. Banbreach reported that cities which have the highest prevalence of infected routers, the increase is almost five times than last month. The security company Banbreach tracked internet traffic and detected all devices which are on the internet with public IP address and examine the traffic passing through the routers. With this data, Banbreach finds a pattern of cryptojacking activity.

Banbreach made three groups of populated areas of India from most to least dense. In the research, Banbreach found that less densely populated areas of India have more proportion of infected routers means three-tier cities are most affected by cryptojacking than tier 1 and tier 2 cities. Tier 2 cities are the least affected by cryptojacking.  Top three cities of India, New Delhi, Mumbai, and Thane have the most infected routers and the growth in these cities is 5x.

Banbreach’s cryptojacking report comes after it was revealed last month that hackers are already using 280,000 MicroTik routers to illegally mine Moreno (XMR) from people’s computers without authorization. In April, Google banned the cryptocurrency mining extension on Chrome. Recently Google reviewed the extension policy of Chrome to reject extensions which had hidden code and add closer monitoring of certain extensions. According to the crypto observers, this move by Google will help in stopping the unauthorized mining of cryptocurrencies on Chrome.