Kaspersky: digital skimming attacks on the rise - The Cryptonomist

Recently the well-known software house dedicated to the protection of PCs, Kaspersky, published a report on digital skimming and malware that have been used in the last year and how these have evolved.

The report reveals that some threats have increased, such as digital skimming, used mainly to clone credit cards, while mining attacks, i.e. malware that uses the victim’s hardware to mine crypto, have decreased by half compared to the previous year.

In fact, when reading the data, it is clear that in 2018 alone the attacks of this type were over 5.6 million, while today the figure is more than halved to 2.2 million attacks: a decrease of 59%.

Obviously, the decrease in attacks related to crypto is due to a number of factors, including the evolution of protection tools and antivirus.

It’s worth mentioning also that criminals use these malware to mine profitable and anonymous assets: in fact, the asset taken as a reference point by criminals, in this case, is Monero (XMR), which in 2018 set its record reaching a value of almost $500.

Over time, this asset has lost value compared to last year and in fact now its value is about $50, which means its value has fallen by 92% compared to its peak and so hackers have probably preferred to move to other types of attacks, such as those related to ransomware, through which they encrypt the victim’s files to request a ransom in bitcoin (BTC).

This type of hacker attack has affected several cities; such as Baltimore, while Italy is the most affected country.

So, if on the one hand it is true that certain crypto attacks have decreased, on the other, it is also true that they have evolved and/or moved to other platforms and systems with ingenious strategies such as viruses sent via simple audio files.

According to the report, to avoid any kind of risk it is necessary to keep software up to date and invest in security.