Know All About Detecting an Illegal Cryptocurrency Miner in Your System and Eliminating it

Bitcoin is an exciting technology, a form of “internet money” that is works based on a peer-to-peer network with not regulating authority. Anyone in the world can transfer it to any other person residing in another corner of the globe, skipping any middlemen. Bitcoin is considered to be a disruptive technology that may replace other payment forms in the future. It could be the next PayPal, Mastercard, or Visa.

Bitcoin mining

The complex part of the Bitcoin monetary system is mining. Because it requires colossal computing power that an average home or business machine cannot provide. Therefore, Bitcoin miners rely on a vast pool of connected computing resources to mine out the crypto currency. But computing power does not come for free: it requires high-end hardware that is power hungry. To offset these costs, Bitcoin rewards miners for their contribution to the network by awarding them coins. The reward is fixed (currently, 25 coins every 10 minutes) and miners share it, proportionally to the computing power they contributed.

Illicit mining operations

There is, however, another way to contribute to the Bitcoin mining and still make Bitcoins. By stealing the power. Crooks are stealthily getting hold of mining power from various systems pooled together and mining out the Bitcoins. Thereby, cyber criminals can utilize your power to fulfill their mining goals: this can be done by dropping a malware into your system. Crooks gain access to large numbers of infected computers and push their mining malware to maximize profits.

Detecting miners

However, organizations can’t go into tracking power usage, which could affect their daily operations. As an alternative way, enterprises can monitor their network activity by checking for computers that connect to well-known Bitcoin mining platforms or participate in the Bitcoin P2P network. The former is an indication of Bitcoin mining while the latter only points to a possibility of mining. Nevertheless, the solutions in the market allow you to flag such illicit mining operations and save your valuable resources from freeloaders. Typically, the solutions come with a complex machine learning based algorithm to identify which application initiated each connection.

Illicit Bitcoin mining is pretty real, and crooks are using the naivety of users to steal their resources. The sooner users wake up to this hard reality, the earlier they can stop their resources from being stolen.