Phishing Attacks on Bitcoin Wallets Surge as Bitcoin Price Skyrockets

During the past week, bitcoin price exceeded the $900 mark for the first time during the past 3 years. The reason behind this recent price surge is not completely clear, especially that the value of bitcoin has increased by more than 100% in less than 6 months.

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Whenever the price of bitcoin surges, cybercriminals’ interest in cryptocurrencies in general rises too.

How the Bitcoin Price Surge Affected Cybercriminals?

The most commonly encountered cybercriminal activity related to bitcoin is more or less related to ransomware. Ransomware are malicious pieces of code, mostly in the form of trojans, that denies the victim’s access to his/her files by encrypting them and then a ransom in bitcoin is requested by the attacker in order to decrypt the files on the victim’s machine back again.

In 2015-2016, tens of thousands of ransomware attacks were recorded. Three main families of ransomware were mostly incriminated; Bitcryptor, CTB-Locker and Coinvault. A year or so ago, most ransomware authors set the ransom to 2 bitcoins, which was equal to around $900. Today, 2 Bitcoins equal more than $1800, which is relatively high, so most authors of ransomware tojans have reduced the ransom to 1 bitcoin, as can be clearly seen on Darknet’s ransomware markets.

Success of ransomware attacks are highly related to the modes of delivery of the carrier trojans rather than periods of bitcoin popularity. After all, ransomware trojans represent the malicious business model of a cybercriminal. Last November, there was a surge in infections with “Locky” ransomware, mainly because it was delivered via phishing. On the other hand, last June exhibited the least cases of ransomware infections in 2016, mainly when the “Angle Exploit Kit” lost its effectiveness.

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