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Evasive Monero Miner

Posted: February 7, 2020

The Evasive Monero Miner is a cyber-threat, which is slightly different from the typical Trojan cryptocurrency miners that online fraudsters use. Often, the Trojanized miners circulating in the wild do not use advanced techniques to disguise their presence, and this makes it fairly easy for tech-savvy users to identify and remove their components manually. The Evasive Monero Miner, on the other hand, is capable of performing in fileless mode, and its corrupted modules are loaded into the infected computer's Random Access Memory (RAM) directly – this eliminates the artifacts that threats like this one leave behind, and makes the job of anti-virus engines more challenging.

The Evasive Monero Miner is used as a first-stage payload, and it does not contain a mining module in it – its purpose is to pave the way for a trojanized copy of the open-source XMRig miner that will be deployed at a later stage. When the Evasive Monero Miner is initialized on a compromised host, it will perform several checks that aim to make sure that the system is not running anti-malware products, and that it is not protected by Windows SmartScreen. If these two conditions are met, the Evasive Monero Miner will decompress and launch a copy of the TOR browser, and then use it to connect to one of the four '.onion' domains it has been configured to use. These domains are set up by the attackers, and they are used to fetch the final miner payload that will be loaded into the computer's memory.

The 'Evasive Monero Miner' Works as an Elaborate Miner Dropper

After the Evasive Monero Miner is done with its job, it will delete all remnants of its activity to minimize the footprint it left behind. In the meantime, the XMRig miner will begin to utilize the computer's hardware resources to mine for a cryptocurrency (usually Monero). While the mining process is running, the user might experience sluggish performance, high CPU temperatures, and system instability issues – these are problems caused by Trojan cryptocurrency miners commonly.

To protect your system, you should rely on a reputable and up-to-date anti-virus engine. In addition to this, it is recommended to be extra careful with the files you download from the Web – do not download files from non-trustworthy sources, and avoid browsing torrent trackers or websites that are meant to spread pirated content.

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