February 13, 2018

Cryptocurrency mining site hijacked millions of Android phones

Smartphone users are just as vulnerable to cryptocurrency mining hijacks as their PC counterparts, and sometimes on a dramatic scale. Malwarebytes has detailed a “drive-by” mining campaign that redirected millions of Android users to a website that hijacked their phone processors for mining Monero. While the exact trigger wasn’t clear, researchers believed that infected apps with malicious ads would steer people toward the pages. And it wasn’t subtle — the site would claim that you were showing “suspicious” web activity and tell you that it was mining until you entered a captcha code to make it stop.

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