There is no official option to watch "Spider-Man: No Way Home" from the comforts of your modest home. Some people who try to watch the movie without making a visit to the cinema have turned to downloading stolen duplicates of the movie; Usually they may have accidentally introduced cryptocurrency mining malware in the process. ReasonLabs made reference to finding malware used to mine the Monero cryptocurrency in a document known as "spiderman_net_putidomoi.torrent.exe", of which the company made an interpretation of the Russian to "spiderman_no_wayhome.torrent.exe", which is essential to think about that "The origin of the file is probably from a Russian torrent website."
The company said that this malware is derived from the open source SilentXMRMiner project that can be downloaded by anyone from GitHub. The project offers a point-and-click interface that allows aspiring malware distributors to create a new miner that supports numerous cryptocurrencies without much effort on their part.
This type of malware spreads by taking advantage of people's desire to interact with popular media. "Spider-Man: No Way Home" is the first film to gross more than $ 1 billion at the box office (during the COVID-19 era) even though it is a cinema exclusive and the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is spreading quickly. So of course people are going to try to hack it.
ReasonLabs said that after its installation, the malware "adds exclusions to Windows Defender, creates persistence, and spawns a watchdog process to keep it going," all of which is enabled through the SilentXMRMiner project. He then dedicates the victim's computing power to mining Monero for whoever created it.
Unfortunately, hackers cannot necessarily rely on antivirus solutions to defend against malware like this. ReasonLabs said it "found several compiled versions of this project, some more obfuscated than others," that can help malware evade signature-based detection systems. (Read: most traditional antivirus software).
"Although this malware does not compromise personal information (which is what most users fear when they think of a virus on their computer)," ReasonLabs said. โThe damage that a miner causes can be seen in the user's electricity bill. It is real money that they have to pay, since the miner works for long periods. Also, damage can be felt on a user's device as miners often require high CPU usage, causing the computer to drastically slow down. "
The company proved its point by submitting the malware to VirusTotal, which scans files and URLs with more than 70 different security tools. Unfortunately, ReasonLabs said that VirusTotal did not mark the malware as malicious when it wrote its report, so the vast majority of popular antivirus solutions would not have protected anyone.
The simplest way to avoid becoming a victim of this malware is to refrain from hacking "Spider-Man: No Way Home". Barring that, ReasonLabs said those who choose to sail the black seas should check what type of file they are downloading. There is no reason for a movie, pirated or not, to be distributed as an executable file.
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- 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' Crypto Malware Hacker Attack
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