Limitations of Web Cryptojacking Detection: A Practical Evaluation

Abstract

Cryptojacking is one of the new threats that emerged several years ago with the growing popularity and increasing value of cryptocurrencies. In essence, it is a malicious technique where the attacker parasites on the victim’s resources like CPU time, memory, etc. to mine cryptocurrencies for his own benefit. Cryptojacking comes in two main flavors, i.e., as a malicious script embedded into the website or as a standalone malware residing on the compromised machine. As such threats are still widespread, in this paper, we perform a practical evaluation of the existing web browser blockers against real-world web-based cryptojacking solutions. The obtained experimental results reveal that in more than 60% of cases the tested defensive solutions fail in fighting this threat or can be easily fooled with a few simple modifications. This underlines the importance of further efforts toward developing effective countermeasures.