Analysts at the system security agency SonicWall believe that against the backdrop of a decrease in the number of ransomware attacks, stealth mining incidents have increased.
SonicWall published its 2022 Cyber Threat Report, which states that the number of hacker attacks on the financial sector using cryptojacking has increased by 269%. According to the document, the number of cyber attacks on this sector of the economy is now five times higher than the number of attacks on retail.
In previous years, governments, healthcare and education were the most common targets of cryptojacking, but in 2022 there was a “big reshuffle”, the financial sector shifted retail to second place:
According to SonicWall, the observed phenomenon is due to a decrease in the number of ransomware attacks, which is caused by increased interest in cryptocurrency-related cyber attacks combined with more stringent ransomware insurance processes. SonicWall Vice President for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Terry Greer-King believes that cryptojacking has a lower chance of being detected by a victim.
“Unsuspecting users around the world are seeing their devices become inexplicably slow, but this is difficult to attribute to criminal activity, much less point to the source,” Greer-King described the symptoms.
In January, Chainalysis reported that the volume of crypto assets stolen by hackers decreased from 75% to 54% in a year. At the same time, 73% of losses from cyber attacks fall on cryptojacking. According to the report, at the end of 2021, stolen crypto assets accounted for 93% of all funds stored in the wallets of criminals, and their total value reached $9.8 billion. Of this amount, only $30 million comes from hacker attacks using cryptojacking.
