A new era of viruses: Coin-Miners

Coin mining has paved its way into the future and it’s not planning to stop just there. Coin mining is the process of running mining hardware which runs cryptographic hashing functions. These functions are run on what is commonly referred to as a block reader. For each independent hash being tried, the software uses different randomly allocated numbers as the random element of the block header. This nonce along with hashing functions yield hashes.

Apart from the technical approach, coin miners are hardware-based, such as via the use of CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC. CPU were the traditional way of coin mining but due to time and system limitations, other approaches proved more convenient. Later on, graphics cards were proven to be more efficient in coin mining, Graphical Processing Unit having a massively parallel nature increased mining power up to a hundred folds. However, the coin mining revolution didn’t stop there. Next came Field Programmable Gate Array, a custom made coin miner hardware. While the Field Programmable Gate Array didn’t necessarily deliver an increase in speed over a hundred folds, they did ensure efficiency and ease of use. Then came the Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) era. Initially, a chip designed to do one thing specifically. A system solely dedicated to the art of mining coins.

Based on these initial offerings, an array of coin miners, are now available in the market. Each of them having key offerings and features, designed to yield results. Basic specifications include for the case of S9 Antminer ASIC:

• A significant Hash Rate: 14.0TH/s ±5%
• Power Consumption: 1375W + 7% (at the wall, with APW3 ,93% efficiency, 25C ambient temp)
• Power Efficiency: 0.098 J/GH + 7%(at the wall, with APW3 93% efficiency, 25°C ambient temp)
• Rated Voltage: 11.60 ~13.00V
• Chip quantity per unit: 189x BM1387
• Cooling 2x 12038 fan
• An Operating Temperature ranging from 0 °C to 40 °C
• An Ethernet Network Connection
• And a Default Frequency of 650M

Dangers of Coin Mining

It’s obvious that everything comes with their fair share of cons, and coin miners are no stranger to the concept. Coin mining is done via the internet and hence exposes the user to cybercriminal miners. Cryptocurrency malware is designed to target botnets of computers. Additionally, a variety of coin mining related threats have surfaced and there is a reason to believe this number will only increase, with masquerade as a component, crossovers, and remote access Trojan just being few of the many. Hence when considering coin mining it is of equal importance to deploy practices that can combat the risk the users are being exposed to.