Cryptojacking is the new ransomware. Is that a good thing?

Making money from mining cryptocurrencies isn’t just something that people do with their own hardware, malware authors have also been creating malicious software to have other people do the hard work them – and we don’t mean cloud mining. While this represents a new fad in the realm of malware authorship though, it may not be around in this guise for long.

These stats were backed up by MalwareByte’s quarterly malware report. It noted that cryptomining had become one of the most common malware in recent months. It suggested that it had increased by as much as 4,000 percent in the consumer sector over the last quarter. It was also growing in the business space, with a 27 percent increase in overall detections during last quarter.

That increase made it the second most common digital infection. MalwareBytes noted over the past three months, falling only just behind adware. In comparison, ransomware, which has been a major threat for the past few years, saw a notable decline in the consumer space, falling by 35 percent.

Part of that could be to do with the more sophisticated targeting of ransomware at businesses and larger enterprises, but it may also be that the top producers of the ransomware software have been halted in their tracks.