'Mining' euphoria is taking over the cyber-world, with people across the globe trying to exploit soaring Bitcoin prices to generate digital money for themselves. Bitcoin mining has become a potentially lucrative business, with swathes of people realising that crypto-currency could be the new gold.
But just imagine this. You have successfully invested and become the owner of an online mining farm. You have invested more and more into its maintenance, including electricity costs, and your blocks now generate digital money for you every day. What's next? You'll want to transfer your currency to an online wallet and perhaps spend some of your earnings.
But once your transactions have been confirmed, what if your money disappears? Due to the unregulated and de-centralised crypto-currency market, there is no chance of recovering your hard-earned money if this happens to you. It's lost.
The booming price of Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies has kicked off a gold rush among hackers who are keen to cash-in. And it's likely that if this has happened to you it's because your computer has been infected by specialised malware known as a 'crypto-stealer'.
Crypto-stealers first appeared several years ago, focused on targeting online payments and re-directing victims to malicious web sites. The recent boom in crypto-currency across global markets has led to a resurgence in this form of attack, putting people's crypto-currency savings at risk.
The CryptoShuffler Trojan is a good example of malware specifically designed for crypto-currency theft, and works by attacking its victims when they are copying and pasting destination wallet numbers during payment transactions.
The creator of CryptoShuffler has been operating for a year, targeting a wide range of the most popular crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, Dash, Monero and others. The peak in this criminal's activity was from the end of last year until June 2017. To-date, the criminals behind this malware have already succeeded in stealing 23 BTC from Bitcoin wallets - that's equivalent to almost 100,000 USD. The total amounts stolen from other wallets range from a few dollars to several thousands.
The mechanism employed by CryptoShuffler is very simple but effective. After it has been installed on the victim's computer, the Trojan starts to monitor the infected device's clipboard, looking for the 'destination address' of a Bitcoing payment. The Trojan simply replaces the destination address chosen by the victim with one owned by the criminals. This takes milliseconds and results in the victim inadvertently transferring their money directly to the criminals - with only the most attentive people likely to spot the switch.
Crypto-currency is becoming part of our daily lives - actively spreading around the world, becoming more available for ordinary people, and thus a more appealing target for criminals. Anyone considering crypto-currency investments should think about protecting their computer carefully: the CryptoShuffler Trojan is not the only malware hunting down crypto-currency savings.
So, how do you keep your crypto-savings safe and avoid paying into the hacker's wallets? One way, of course, is to always pay close attention when you make a transaction, to make sure that the wallet number listed in the 'destination address' line matches the one you are intending to send your coins to. Be aware that there is a difference between an invalid address and an incorrect address. In the first case, the error will be detected and the transaction won't be completed. In the latter, you will never see your money again.
It's also essential to install a robust security solution that provides dedicated functionality for protecting financial transactions. Specifically, in addition to scanning for malware, the product should scan for vulnerabilities that can be exploited by cybercriminals and guard transactions using protected browser technology - in this case, to secure the clipboard containing sensitive data during copy and paste operations.
Crypto-currencies are relatively new, and we've seen prices rise and fall dramatically. Small investments can become large sums overnight. But the opposite can happen too. People looking to invest in crypto-currencies should be aware of the volatility of the market and the dangers they take when buying.