Page 5 - IAV Digital Magazine #492

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Kobe Bryant Wallpaper Caught Spreading Cryptojacking Malware
By Aditya Tiwari
While the world mourns the unex- pected death of the NBA star Kobe Bryant, malicious actors didn’t spend much time taking advantage of the situation.
Microsoft has dis- covered and deactivated a cryptojacking malware hidden inside a Kobe Bryant Nike wall- paper. The mal- ware was report- ed by Redmond’s security intelli- gence unit via Twitter.
“We found a mali- cious HTML file posing as a Kobe Bryant wallpaper
that contains a coin mining script,” the tweet reads.
Microsoft Security Intelligence has identified the malicious HTML file as a Trojan. It contains a script that performs cryptojacking after connecting to a website host- ing the coin miner. It utilizes the victim’s CPU power to illegally mine Monero (XMR), as it con- tains references of the now- defunct CoinHive miner.
However, Microsoft also added that the Windows Defender
SmartScreen tool is now capable of blocking the said website, thereby deactivating the crypto-jacking malware. The job of SmartScreen to find potentially malicious web- sites, apps, exe- cutables.
It isn’t the first time we have seen cryptocur- rency miners masquerading themselves as images of popular celebrities. Another well- known case of the American country singer Taylor Swift whose image was used to spread MyKingz botnet back in 2019.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine