Mining has been taking over the world and we already talked about sites that use your CPU computing power in order to make money by mining digital currency. It seems that there was a mining malware attack recently and Windows Defender was able to protect 500,000 PCs against the attack. Here we are going to look into the matter.
The majority of the attacks were traced back to Russia, 72% to give you a number. Other countries that were affected include Turkey and Ukraine. The company claimed that the machine learning models enable the system to block threats within milliseconds after they have been detected by Windows Defender. This is very impressive indeed. According to Microsoft:
Within milliseconds, multiple metadata-based machine learning models in the cloud started blocking these threats at first sight.Seconds later, our sample-based and detonation-based machine learning models also verified the malicious classification. Within minutes, detonation-based models chimed in and added additional confirmation.
Within minutes, an anomaly detection alert notified us about a new potential outbreak.
After analysis, our response team updated the classification name of this new surge of threats to the proper malware families. People affected by these infection attempts early in the campaign would have seen blocks under machine learning names like Fuery, Fuerboos, Cloxer, or Azden. Later blocks show as the proper family names, Dofoil or Coinminer.
The cryptocurrency situation has been getting out of hand and graphics cards prices are going off the charts but it seems that miners are not the only ones to blame when it comes to inflated graphics cards prices. According to Nvidia:
All new cell phones coming out by Apple and Samsung (and others) last year started using the same memory as graphics cards. Apple and Samsung are willing to pay more for this memory to make sure they get it first and all of it that they need. This has created a shortage of memory for the much smaller companies like MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, and EVGA to make graphics cards.
We have been getting word that not only graphics cards but other PC hardware will be getting expensive as well this year as well as the next. If you made your gaming PC around the time Pascal came out then you are very lucky.
Let us know what you think about this attack that Windows Defender was able to protect against and whether or not you use the software.
