How to Mitigate the Threat Cryptocurrency Mining Poses to Enterprise Security

The growing popularity of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is generating curiosity—and concern—among security specialists. Crypto mining software has been found on user machines, often installed by botnets. Organizations need to understand the risks posed by this software and what actions, if any, should be taken.

To better advise our readers, we reached out to the security researchers at Cato Networks. Cato provides a cloud-based SD-WAN that includes FireWall as a Service (FWaaS). Its research team, Cato Research Labs, maintains the company's Cloud IPS, and today released a list of crypto mining pool addresses that you can use as a blacklist in your firewall. (To download the list, visit this page.)

Cato Research Labs determined crypto mining represents a moderate threat to the organization. Immediate disruption of the organization infrastructure or loss of sensitive data is not likely to be a direct outcome of crypto mining.

However, there are significant risks of increased facility cost that must be addressed.

Understanding Blockchain and Crypto Mining

Crypto mining is the process of validating cryptocurrency transactions and adding encrypted blocks to the blockchain. Miners solve a hash to establish a valid block, receiving a reward for their efforts. The more blocks mined, the more difficult and resource-intensive becomes solving the hash to mine a new block.