Our story begins with the son of the Cibernauta family arriving home from college. He was very excited, as a new update for his favorite game “4Knights” had just come out . This application had been the most downloaded by users, both young and old, for some time now.
The first thing our protagonist did upon arriving at the family home was to turn on his laptop, open the browser and access the official website to begin downloading the latest update.
He didn't have to wait long for the game to update and he could log in. His friends were waiting for him. They had been waiting for this update for months!
The days went by and our protagonist realized that his computer was not working as it should: it took much longer to start up, the battery was lasting less and less, and some applications and games that he could previously run without problems were now barely usable because they were so slow.
Faced with the drop in performance of his computer , the son of the family went to check some system data. To his surprise, both the temperature and the performance of some components, such as the processor and the graphics card of his computer, were at very high levels , despite not having any applications open at that time.
“How strange!” thought our protagonist. The only thing that had changed in the last few weeks was the update of the “4Knights” game.
What had happened?
To be sure, he decided to do a quick search on the Internet and… surprise! It didn’t take long for him to find several news items explaining that a vulnerability had been found on the “4Knights” game website. A cybercriminal had taken advantage of this flaw to replace the latest update with another modified one with malicious code capable of carrying out a cryptojacking attack .
Users who downloaded this update were infected by the malware and their brazil phone number data computers became miners for the cybercriminal. So, when the Cibernauta family's son downloaded the new update, it had already been replaced by the version that included the cybercriminal's malicious code. In addition, the malware also blocked the notification system on their computer, so they were never aware that anything was wrong, unless they did a little research.
How did it all end?
Luckily for our protagonist, the creators of the game had solved the problem and had posted on their website the steps to follow to solve the problem:
Example image of notification email
How can we protect ourselves?
Unfortunately, cybercriminals are always finding new ways to profit from users, and cryptocurrency mining is no exception.
Sometimes it is not necessary to download and run malicious software, just access a specific website. Cybercriminals use malicious code fragments that they insert into the website's code. This way, every time a user accesses the website, the malicious part of the code is activated and bitcoin mining begins without the user being aware of it.
