By Byron V. Acohido

Illicit crypto mining is advancing apace.

It was easy to see this coming. It began when threat actors began stealthily embedding crypto mining functionality into the web browsers of unwitting individuals. Cryptojacking was born. And now, the next-level shift is underway.

Related article: Illicit crypto mining hits cloud services

Cybercriminals have shifted their focus to burrowing onto company servers and then redirecting those corporate computing resources to crypto mining chores. They are doing this using both tried-and-true, as well as leading-edge, hacking techniques.

I recently unwrapped these developments in a discussion with Liviu Arsene, senior security analyst at Bitdefender, which has been closely monitoring this trend. One key bit of intelligence Bitdefender shares in a whitepaper is a breakdown of how EternalBlue has come into play, once again.

You may recall EternalBlue was one of the cyber weapons stolen from the NSA and used in the milestone WannaCry ransomware attack in the spring of 2017. WannaCry used EternalBlue to deploy a self-spreading worm to help rapidly spread a globe-spanning ransomware campaign. It also used PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation script to infect the victim, followed by Mimikatz to pull logins and passwords from a computer’s memory in order to move laterally across the infrastructure.

And now in 2018 EternalBlue is propagating a very similar worm, dubbed WannaMine, that has been seeking company servers to infect – and redirect to crypto mining chores – in 150 countries.

This is part of a rising number of advanced attacks designed to penetrate data centers of private and public cloud infrastructures which have the computing resources coveted by crypto miners.

The criminals aren’t asking for any ransom. They’re just taking – or more precisely, consuming — what they want: …more

One sliver of the $90 billion, or so, companies are expected to spend this year on cybersecurity products and services is an estimated $85 million they will shell out for encrypted flash drives.

One of more fascinating innovators in this space is 11-year-old DataLocker, based in Overland Park, Kansas.

Related: How DataLocker got its starth

Co-founder Jay took a business trip to South Korea in the fall of 2007. A chance meeting – in an elevator, no less – led to Kim veering over to the cybersecurity industry.

DataLocker honed its patented approach to manufacturing encrypted portable drives and landed some key military and government clients early on; the company has continued branching out ever since. DataLocker has grown to 40 employees and this summer moved it’s headquarters to a larger office, with room to grow.

I recently had the chance to visit with Shauna Park, channel manager at DataLocker. We discussed why encrypted flash drives have become established as a must-have portable business tool in the digital age. For a full drill down please listen to the accompanying podcast. Here are excerpts edited for clarity and length.

LW: With all the wonders of the digital age, it’s fascinating how important it can be to have an encrypted drive in the palm of your hand when you really need one.

Park: Exactly. The encryption in our products is handled by a chip inside the actual hardware itself. So it’s easy to use for anybody; you don’t have to know how to do encryption. The hardware itself takes care of it for you. All the user needs is a strong password to access to the data.

LW: Where do encrypted drives typically come into play in a business setting? …more