Critical Insight Helps Customer "Hang-Up" on Illegal Crypto Miner

A cryptocurrency miner got into a business’s newly upgraded phone system and a vigilant Critical Insight Analyst caught it. The business was able to kick out the miner before there was significant damage.

Within minutes, she alerted the customer to the suspicious activity and started a Critical Insight investigation. The investigation revealed an active case of crypto jacking. 

Cryptomining malware has become one of the top cyber threats to emerge, and our internal experts believe the problem will continue in the years to come. This technique allows Illegal crypto miners to hack into external systems and steal computing power to mine cryptocurrency. This frees up the miner from having to make expensive investments in their own equipment.

Using the threat intelligence provided by the Critical Insight analyst, our customer was able to figure out that their newly upgraded phone system had been hacked. The IT Director at the company used this intel to quickly stop the crypto coin mining and eject the threat actor from the network.

While we have removed any identifying information about this customer, we can tell you they use Critical Insight for Managed Detection Response (MDR). That means that Critical Insight’s technology monitors the network for abnormalities—and our security analysts respond when there’s a real threat.

Our analysts then conduct thorough investigations to eliminate false positives, and kick-off the incident response plan with the customer when a true compromise occurs. The customer can then eliminate the threat, as happened in this crypto jacking case. Threat detection, human response: it’s what we do.