Security News > 2021 > July > Cisco Talos researchers find crypto mining detections have doubled in the last year
Cisco Talos researchers note in a new analysis that "Unauthorized software on end systems is never a good sign. Today it's a crypto miner, tomorrow it could be the initial payload in an eventual ransomware attack."
Crypto mining has increased from 3% of all mining alerts in January 2020 to 6% in March 2021, according to analysis from Talos.
Talos used network-based detection to monitor crypto mining activity and tracked the rate that certain SNORT rules that target crypto miners fired.
The Cisco Talos researchers chose to track Monero's value because previous research found that many large-scale crypto mining campaigns favored this particular currency.
In October 2020, Cisco Talos researchers reported on an increase in activity of the Lemon Duck crypto miner.
As Lance Whitney explained in an article about crypto mining scams, crypto mining uses a computer's processing power to solve complicated mathematical problems as a way to verify cryptocurrency transactions.