KingMiner: The New Adaptive Mining Malware With Endless Possibilities

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Mining malware has had a very negative influence on the crypto and mining community. Earlier this year, official Indian government websites were found to be massively infected. That pales in comparison to the threat of the recently-discovered adaptive mining malware named KingMiner.

Unfortunately, this is not something out of a cheap sci-fi movie. Check Point Software Technologies is an Israel-based cybersecurity firm. The firm’s researchers believe that KingMiner is adapting or evolving.

KingMiner is the first adaptive mining malware. It’s mining monero and was firstly discovered back in June. The malware however, seems to be evolving and is changing its appearance with time in order to avoid detection. Kingminer is quickly adapting to possible threats and even manages to replace and update older versions of itself.

It’s completely normal that researchers are puzzled by this new discovery. The adaptive mining malware is a potential gateway to digital disasters. There are no guarantees KingMiner will keep adapting only to potential new threats while only seeking to mine monero and avoid detection. If this malware is redesigned it could be used for far more than just mining and personal gain.

KingMiner may still be a work in progress

At this moment, Kingminer is mostly targeting Microsoft servers. It usually hijacks about 75% of the host CPU’s mining capacity. Some observed cases however, have seen the adaptive mining software increase the hijacked capacity up to the maximum 100%. The adaptive mining malware is also using a private mining pool in order to entirely avoid detection.

Some of the company’s researchers believe the problem is very serious and stated:

“Watching the adapting mining malware is like watching a virus evolve. It constantly adds new features and bypass methods in order to avoid any chance of detection. At the current moment, we cannot determine which of the domains are being used. We do however, see that the attack is spreading at an alarming rate in multiple hotspots like Israel, India, Mexico and Norway.”

According to the researches this seemingly endless ability to change will guarantee the malware success. With time such malware and attacks will become more and more common and it’s only a matter of time before something that will reshape the entire digital landscape, sees the light of day, or screen.

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