In a series of articles on Apple management, security researcher Matt Benyo looks at a family of cryptojacking malware targeting Apple devices and how it can be used in a range of different industries.

In his blog post, Benyo explores the rise of malicious cryptocurrency miners and how they're used to steal unsuspecting users' computing power and CPU cycles.

The seven-part blog series, which was published by Anomali, an Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) solution provider, looks at a new malware family that affects Apple devices.

The article discusses how the malware uses an open-source mining tool to mine for Monero cryptocurrency by hijacking the browsers of unsuspecting users without their knowledge.

Cryptojacking is a form of cyberattack that consists in illegal use of computer resources, such as processing power and bandwidth, for crypto currency mining purposes.

There are two main types of cryptojacking: stealthy types and the more notorious ones, according to Benyo.

Stealthy Cryptojacking is the type that targets devices with a web browser in the background, where miners inject themselves into the page and "hijack" resources such as CPU time and network bandwidth.

Invisible miners are sometimes referred to as deeply embedded miners because they hide under different names, e.g. Google Chrome extensions or fake software updates, to avoid detection by security scanners. These types of attacks can be used in organizations by phishing users into installing malware or clicking on harmful URLs.

In the case of invisible miners, they use malicious software on a user's device to create a virtual machine using the CPU power of infected devices. As the threat uses an open-source mining tool, it is possible to use other computers around the world to power mining.

According to Benyo, these mining tools are sometimes used as a proxy for cryptojacking operations because they can obtain way more resources than users would normally have access to.

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Source: Beware of macOS cryptojacking malware. - AlienVault - Open Threat Exchange