Ukrainian Man Caught Cryptojacking On His Own Website

By Rishma Banerjee

Though the adoption of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies have gone up by leaps and bounds, a marked increase has also been noted in the rate of related criminal activities. More innovative and unique ways of scamming are being revealed every now and then. As per reports published by the local law enforcement, Ukraine’s Cyber Police, the branch of the national police dealing with cybercrime have arrested a man who had been allegedly placing crypto mining malware scripts on his own websites. The suspect is a 32-year-old man from the Bukovina region and he had been illegally placing cryptojacking software on a number of educational websites that he created and administered.

The report filed by the police revealed that the unspecified websites and internet resources had 1.5 million monthly visitors. It also notes that the installed malware on the websites was deploying visitors’ devices’ CPU and GPU power to illegally mine cryptocurrencies.

Cryptojacking malware activity has seen tremendous growth recently, with cybersecurity firm McAfee Labs reporting in late December that the total instances of cryptojacking malware rose by more than 4,000 per cent in 2018. It is only natural that with the rise in the popularity and acceptance of cryptocurrencies, people will be trying to maximize their mining capacities, by hook or by crook.

Amidst this atmosphere of increased cryptocurrency related regulations, the authorities concerned conducted a thorough search in the house of the alleged cybercriminal and seized his computer equipment, bank cards, hard drives and notes in order to launch criminal proceedings. The report also specifies that the finer is slated to face a term of upto six years of imprisonment.

Recently, AT&T Cybersecurity reported that crypto mining is one of the most observed purposes of hackers that attack businesses’ cloud infrastructures. In late February, notorious online crypto miner firm Coinhive announced that the service is shutting down since it reportedly become economically inefficient.