New Cryptocurrency Malware Destroys Smartphones In Abusive Mining Operation

Just to illustrate how pervasive cryptocurrency has become and how competitive the industry is, a new malware is now going around infecting smartphones to mine coins. The worst part is how it basically abuses the devices in an attempt to extract as much processing power from them that they cause the batteries to fry.

As Extreme Tech notes, mobile devices have become the main computing hardware for a lot of people. While not as powerful as PCs, the sheer number of them makes smartphones valuable processing resources. The creators of a new kind of malware called Loapi realized this fact, which prompted them to infect mobile devices that would help them mine digital coins.

Hijacking the phone’s processing power is bad enough. However, this malware is reportedly so abusive that it cranks up the device’s processing power to its maximum threshold.

Normally, the phone’s software prevents this from happening in order to avoid overheating the device. According to researchers at the antivirus firm Kaspersky Labs, however, the malware uses up practically every process of the device. This helps the creators mine cryptocurrency until the battery is burned out.

In the worst case scenario, the battery could even explode. With regards to how the malware is spread, the researchers have found the infectious software in certain advertising campaigns.

“Samples of the Loapi family are distributed via advertising campaigns. Malicious files are downloaded after the user is redirected to the attackers’ malicious web resource. We found more than 20 such resources, whose domains refer to popular antivirus solutions and even a famous porn site,” the researchers note.

The researchers are also marveling at how the malware has so many modules. In fact, they say that they have never encountered such a “jack of all trades” before. The malware apparently even possesses capabilities that the creators have not taken advantage of yet, presumably because they don’t help with cryptocurrency mining.