Developers of some mobile games mine cryptocurrency on users' smartphones

The course of bitcoin and many altcoins is constantly growing. This contributes to the development of mining, in a variety of its manifestations. For example, some torrent trackers decided to try out a new way of monetization - to get some cryptocurrency at the expense of their users. The same The Pirate Bay has tested this method several times, both with the ability to disable crypto-mining by the user, and without such an option.



Now a similar way to get additional revenue is being tested by mobile game developers. This method has become known from the employee of the Kapersky Laboratory, Andrei Malanov. According to him, in a number of games for smartphones, users can receive bonuses using game currency. The developers of some games have added a new way to get such a currency by the user - mining.



The module built into the game starts to get cryptocurrency at the start of the game. Coins, respectively, gets the developer, and the user added bonus points or in-game currency. True, this is not about Bitcoins or Monero. Mobile applications minekat Magi cryptocurrency (XMG). Its capitalization is only $ 3.3 million, according to Vedomosti.



According to the representative of "Kaspersky Lab", these tools can not be called malicious, because the user is warned about mining, and he starts the game of his own accord. However, the cryptocurrency mining program uses almost the entire amount of the available resources of the mobile device on which the miner is running.



According to Trend Micro, mobile crypto miners embedded in mobile devices can hardly be called malicious. And the first cases of mining cryptocurrency games and applications for smartphones became known several years ago. Now we are talking about the fact that the cases of adding mining modules by software developers have become more frequent. According to experts from Trend Micro, a significant amount of production of cryptomonet of any type of mobile devices can not speak. However, the battery life of the smartphone battery is significantly reduced due to the fact that the resources of the phone are used for mining.



In the official app stores, programs that allow you to mine cryptocurrency were not banned six months ago. Similarly, the situation with the software, which contains crypto-modules that are not the main part of such an application. Now a number of application catalogs have introduced such a ban, but those who want to earn a little crypt on users' smartphones have not diminished. True, "clean" miners have become rare, instead of them applications have begun to appear that are disguised as entertainment applications.



Most of these programs are downloaded to Google Play, so that users of the Android operating system are at risk. The fact is that if a user permits downloading unverified applications, then the developers of mining programs will have a good chance to somehow convince the owner of the smartphone to download a game or other program with a miner.



According to the deputy head of the Computer-forensics lab at Group-IB, Sergei Nikitin, mobile gadgets do not have much power that can be used to mine cryptocurrencies. Well, to create botnets from smartphones is an expensive and long pleasure.



In order to prevent the next miner, masquerading as a respectable application, from entering his mobile device, you need to use the usual methods. During the installation, it is worth looking at how many times the program has been downloaded, check the permissions requested by the applications and read the comments of other users who have already tried the program in operation.



As for websites, one of the largest resources that added the cryptocurrency mining module was The Pirate Bay torrent tracker. For the first time, the administration tried this method to obtain additional funding in September of this year. The first to try to make tracker with the help of its users were those visitors whose computers began to work much slower while visiting The Pirate Bay. As it turned out, Coinhive script embedded in Monero mining is embedded in the code of the pages. This is a cryptocurrency, which is considered one of the most anonymous.