You might have heard of a new threat called a crypto-miner. These infections are very easy to distribute; therefore, hackers are becoming more involved in these scams. XMRig Miner Trojan is one of the threats that will utilize your computer resources and generate Monero crypto-currency. These malware threats are more evasive than ever and some people might not even be aware that they are compromised.
Crypto-miners like XMRig are difficult, but not impossible to detect
In order to find out whether you are infected with this infection, you should open your Windows Task Manager. Then, take a look at the utilized CPU resources. If the usage reaches 90% or more, it is very likely that your computer is infected with a crypto-miner. Security researchers have indicated that the XMRig miner is very active in Germany. Therefore, if you would like to read descriptions of this infection in the German-language, click here.
XMRig miner can also be used legitimately and people will be able to set certain parameters like the Monero wallet and the password of the user. However, once the crypto-miner is delivered illegally, its parameters are pre-configured, and the command-line display is not visible. This specific XMRig miner has caused a lot of issues for people in Japan, Taiwan, China, India, and the US. The modified code uses computers’ resources without permission and mines crypto-currencies for the hackers.
Security researchers have indicated that XMRig crypto-miner is able to avoid detection because of its stealthy activity. For instance, the miner might be set to use a minimal amount of system power, making it impossible to suspect mining activities. Recently, it has been reported that hackers were exploiting an old vulnerability in Linux servers and pushing cryptocurrency miners. This campaign of XMRig was very successful and managed to make hackers a profit of $74,000 USD.
If you do not want to become compromised by crypto-miners like XMRig Trojan, we hope that you will use the necessary anti-malware tools. In addition to that, there are special ad-blockers which are programmed to block crypto-mining scripts. If you are not careful, your operating system could be secretly utilized by hackers. As a result, you might even have to pay bigger electric bills.