Ransomware is old school - Crypto-mining is the new trend

A single hijacked box can typically mine about 25 cents of Monero a day. Multiply that over tens of thousands of machines, and it adds up to a nice little earner

Criminals are cutting out the middle person – the human victim – and infecting machines with remote-controlled malware that quietly mines alt-coins and slips the digital dosh back to its masters.

Criminals are shifting from coining it with ransomware to raking it in directly with stealthy miners.


Here is the fun part
The Talos team found one inept CPU-cycle thief who was installing open-source mining code called NiceHash Miner, which is on GitHub. The crook forgot to change the default settings in the app, meaning that any coinage mined when to the software's developer, not the idiot sticking it on other people's systems.


https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/01/monero_mining_malware/