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Attacks on iPhones up four-fold in September

Published on: 30 Oct 2018

Cryptomining attacks against Apple iPhones increased by almost 400 per cent in September, according to Check Point Software Technologies, which has just revealed the most common malware threats of last month.

These Apple-aimed attacks are centred around the Coinhive mining malware, which has been the most prevalent form of malware since December 2017, impacting a fifth of organisations worldwide.

Dorkbot - a worm designed to allow remote code execution and download additional malware to infected systems - ranked as the second most widespread malware in September, followed by Cryptoloot, which exploits a victim’s CPU or GPU power and existing resources for cryptomining. This Coinhive competitor essentially tries to undercut it by asking for a lower percentage of revenue from websites.

A spokesperson from Check Point warned that crypto-mining continues to be the world’s most dominant threat online.

“What is most interesting is the four-fold increase in attacks against iPhones, and against devices using the Safari browser during the last two weeks of September,” they said.

“These attacks against Apple devices are not using new functionality, so we are continuing to investigate the possible reasons behind this development”.

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