BlackBerry Cybersecurity Team Reveals The Threat Of Suspicious And Exploiting Cryptocurrencies

BlackBerry has managed to stop more than 1.5 million cyberattacks (photo: twitter @BlackBerry)

JAKARTA - During the period between March and May, the cybersecurity division of the former mobile phone giant BlackBerry has managed to stop more than 1.5 million cyberattacks and identify families of malware who are actively trying to take over computers to mine or steal cryptocurrence.

According to a BlackBerry report, the three industries most affected by cyber attacks are finance, health, and government. One of the threats of a malware named RedLine has become a long-lived financial threat and is tasked with gathering cryptocurrency and banking information.

Ransomware Clopp, as a variant of the CryptoMix ransomware family, is also a common threat targeting banking and financial institutions. Malware is responsible for data breaches on financial technology banking platform Hatch Bank.

In BlackBerry's list of the most common malware families, SmokeLoader, RaccoonStealer (also known as RecordBreaker), and Vidar occupies the top spot. SmokeLoader is one of the oldest fake financial tools since 2011, which Russian-based threat actors mainly use to load crypto miners, along with other malware.

RaccoonStealer has been used to steal cryptocurrency wallet data and is reportedly sold on the dark web. Meanwhile, Vidar is also widely used to steal cryptocurrency wallets.

Linux is the main target of all operating systems, and BlackBerry advises organizations to routinely implement security updates. Hackers are targeting Linux to take over and use computer resources to mine cryptocurrencies. There is also a variant of a new infostealer malware called Atomic macOS that targets macOS users, in particular to collect credentials from keychain, browsers, and crypto wallets, among others.