Good YouTube video: “Rise of the Miners Josh Grunzweig”
Ransomware is no longer a viable method of making money for the criminals, since Bitcoin is worth a lot of money, and it would be difficult to get people to pay for their ransomed computers.
So the Criminals have moved to Cryptomining.
The cryptominers have infected hundreds of thousands of machines to capture pennies per day for each machine. Together on a daily basis the criminal can accumulate wealth. And it never ends. 609000 machines times 2 pennies per day = $12,180 per day or $365,000 per month. $4.4mil per year.
It may be worth it for the criminal to spend a little money on spam or watering hole attacks. A water hole attack is where a popular website is infected with malware (a water hole). as soon as the infections go into the hundreds of thousands the traffic and infrastructure will be noticed, so you may need to bribe various organizations as well. Like in Russia, you may have to pay the local government officials to keep quiet (or China too).
In North Korea, the state itself could be running an operation like this.
Contact us to discuss this phenomenon.