Pripyat Miner Sold on Hacking Forums
Russian malware creators are selling and renting out a new piece of malware, which has the ability to utilize a system's CPU resources in order to mine for Monero. While cryptocurrency mining malware is not novel, new names like the Pripyat Miner may often boast extra features, which aim to prevent detection. This appears to be the primary goal of Pripyat Miner – its creators claim to be using a new type of crypter to render the malware fully undetectable by antivirus tools. As you can probably guess, this is an exaggeration – an up-to-date anti-malware tool will easily protect you from the Pripyat Miner, and any malware of this sort.
One of the worrisome things about this threat is the low price tag – its creators ask for just $22 to send the ready-to-use miner to their customers. This means that the Pripyat Miner could become quite popular among newbie hackers, and they will utilize all sorts of random tricks to spread it on the Internet.
The risks of being infected by the Pripyat Miner can be quite significant. First of all, the malware will ruin your system's performance by consuming significant CPU resources to mine for Monero. In addition to this, this might reduce the lifespan of your components, and increase the CPU's temperature. Overall, the Pripyat Miner could lead to hardware damage – removing is mandatory. To ensure that Pripyat Miner is not active on your device, we advise you to run regular scans using an up-to-date anti-malware software suite.
