Thousands of websites hacked by illegal mining software, report says

Recently, RiskIQ released a data report that details the global cryptocurrency mining industry. RiskIQ is one of the most well-known research institutions in the field of digital security management and claims to have been tracking the cryptocurrency mining industry for the past 23 weeks.

RiskIQ’s native web crawler technology reportedly downloaded relevant data from thousands of websites to evaluate and analyze the marketing of various components embedded in cryptocurrency mining software on websites. The agency analyzed the situation of 10,000 websites around the world compiled by Alexa, including parameters such as mining cycle, website infrastructure, and component popularity.

RiskIQ found that 415 of the “most frequently visited” websites were hosting cryptocurrency miners, with “.com” domains attracting 4,268 mining malware embeds, followed by “.fm” and “.net” domains with 3,027 and 388 mining malware threats, respectively.

In terms of countries, the country with the most illegal mining using websites is the United States, with Germany and France ranking second and third respectively. However, RiskIQ did not disclose the specific IP address data affected.