Tobias Dam presented our paper on the detection of hidden cryptominers on websites at ARES conference in Hamburg.

Julian Rauchberger, Sebastian Schrittwieser, Tobias Dam, Robert Luh, Damjan Buhov, Gerhard Pötzelsberger, Hyoungshick Kim. The Other Side of the Coin: A Framework for Detecting and Analyzing Web-based Cryptocurrency Mining Campaigns. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES). 2018

Abstract:
Mining for cryptocurrencies is usually performed on high-performance single purpose hardware or GPUs. However, mining can be easily parallelized and distributed over many less powerful systems. Cryptojacking is a new threat on the Internet and describes code included in websites that uses a visitor’s CPU to mine for cryptocurrencies without the their consent. This paper introduces MiningHunter, a novel web crawling framework which is able to detect mining scripts even if they obfuscate their malicious activities. We scanned the Alexa Top 1 million websites for cryptojacking, collected more than 13,400,000 unique JavaScript les with a total size of 246 GB and found that 3,178 websites perform cryptocurrency mining without their visitors’ consent. Furthermore, MiningHunter can be used to provide an in-depth analysis of cryptojacking campaigns. To show the feasibility of the proposed framework, three of such campaigns are examined in detail. Our results provide the most comprehensive analysis to date of the spread of cryptojacking on the Internet.