Virus Post

Millions of machines around the world are engaged in cryptomining to support the blockchains behind popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero. Many people enter into mining willingly in order to earn some cash on the side and to support the growing blockchain movement.\r\n\r\nBut at the same time, some hackers are stealing computing resources from unknowing victims, putting their cycles towards mining cryptocurrencies to enrich themselves. (We\'ve previously covered this phenomenon, known as cryptojacking, in our \"Word of the Week\" series.)\r\n\r\nNow breaking news suggests that the cryptojacking phenomenon is growing at an alarming rate, according to an article in The Next Web:\r\n\r\nText\r\nNearly 50,000 WordPress sites have been surreptitiously infected with crypto-jacking scripts, according to security researcher Troy Mursch from Bad Packets Report.\r\n\r\nRelying on source-code search engine PublicWWW to scan the web for pages running crypto-jacking malware, Mursch was able to identify at least 48,953 affected websites.\r\n\r\nThe researcher notes that Coinhive continues to be the most widespread crypto-jacking script out there, accounting for close to 40,000 infected websites – a stunning 81 percent of all recorded cases.\r\nThis number has been steadily growing since last year. At last count by the same researcher in November 2017, there were around 30,000 WordPress sites infected with cryptomining scripts. That\'s a 66 percent in less than 6 months.