A lot of the scams surfacing in the crypto world are in your face - outright theft of coin, blatant pump and dumps, and outright fraud. But there's one scam hiding in the shadows that needs to see more of the blazing light of day.
Bilal Khan recently posted this entry in The SHI Blog. talking about crypto jacking. From the article:
While cryptojacking is a relatively new threat, its leech-like attack has already latched on to over 4,000 websites, including government sites in the U.S. and U.K. Smartphones aren’t even safe – in early 2018, Malwarebytes identified millions of smartphones that were hijacked for mining cryptocurrency, with phones growing so hot from the processing they were at risk of melting.
This is one of those scams that runs around behind the scenes, wreaking havoc and giving crypto a bad name. This type of attack is transparent to the user and the perpetrators work hard to insinuate their malware in innocuous places where people are likely to go while surfing the web. They are also playing on the newness of crypto, relying on the fact that a lot of people are curious and will be searching for information. Websites are easy to spin up and you only need to look decent, provide enough information to seem legit and get people to click on something to launch the mining code.
Truthfully, anyone spending time researching crypto sites and projects could become a victim, not just beginners. It's still a wild and crazy universe. Make sure your own security practices are up to date and be a little paranoid. It might save you some serious pain.