Attacks on cloud computing platforms with crypto mining malware have increased drastically this year with hundreds of infected computing containers online, Skybox Security security revealed.

“Vulnerabilities in cloud containers have increased by 46 percent compared to the same period in 2018 and by 240 percent compared to 2017,” the security company stated in its report.

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However, the more common attacks on desktop computers dramatically went down in the same period.

“Use of malicious cryptominers — cybercriminals’ overwhelming tool of choice in 2018 — has declined to just 15 percent of malware attacks, with ransomware, botnets and backdoors rising to fill the void,” Skybox Security noted.

“More than 7,000 new vulnerabilities were discovered in the first half of 2019 — that’s still significantly more than figures we’d see for an entire year pre-2017.”

Servers are more lucrative targets than individual devices

The Coindesk report also detailed that malware attacks like “Nansh0u campaign” are targeting enterprise networks, including computers in healthcare, media, and IT companies. According to an estimation, around 700 new computers become the target of such crypto-mining malware.

“Cloud technology and adoption has obviously skyrocketed, so it’s no surprise that vulnerabilities within cloud technology will increase,” Marina Kidron of Skybox told the publication.

“What is concerning, though, is that as these are published, the race is on for attackers to develop an exploit because launching a successful attack on a container could have much broader consequences. Compared to other technology, containers can be more numerous and quickly replicated. The attack footprint could expand rapidly, and number of victims may be extremely high.”

Last month, Finance Magnates reported that a fake crypto trading bot website was distributing malware to its visitors’ computers, which includes information-stealing Trojans, miners, and even clipboard hijackers.

Another crypto mining malware was recently discovered, which targets vulnerable Linux servers to mine privacy-focused digital currency Monero.

Earlier this year, the infamous crypto-mining malware Shellbot was updated by its developers to shut down all crypto mining services on the infected computer to squeeze all the processing power.