Windows 10 warning: Beware staff planting cryptominers on work systems, says Microsoft
Summary
Microsoft says its seen a huge surge in coin-mining trojans hitting Windows PCs across the world in the past six months and is cautioning businesses not to treat them as a nuisance but as a serious threat.Between September 2017 and January 2018 on average 644,000 computers become potentially infected with coin-mining malware, according to Microsofts Windows Defender researchers Alden Pornasdoro, Michael Johnson, and Eric Avena."What we did wasnt just to disrupt a relatively harmless mining campaign, but to detect and interrupt a distribution vector that could just as easily have delivered ransomware to those targets," Payne wrote on Twitter .It classifies these instances as potentially unwanted applications (PUAs), which it notes might be harder to detect than their trojan counterparts if theyre configured to work below a certain threshold.For example, a miner Microsoft detects as Trojan:Win32/CoinMiner is installed via malicious Office documents containing this DDE exploit , which delivers a PowerShell downloader.
