New Avast Report Details How Clipsa Crypto Stealing Malware Was Blocked Over 360k Times In Past Year

Cybersecurity company Avast says that a crypto stealing malware has so far been blocked over 360,000 times by its security software, the Nextweb reports.

Referred as Clipsa, the malware is said to be a multipurpose password stealer and can steal or launch crypto-mining albeit illicitly.

According to Avast Clipsa has the capability to replace a crypto address if the system is infected and the malware directs the funds to another destination owned by the hackers.

The malware is also believed to deploy XMRig which is a crypto-mining script which runs surreptitiously on the affected systems. The cryptos mined is believed to be forwarded to the hackers’ wallet address.

According to security experts in Avast, the malware is believed to be originating from malicious codec installers that come with media players.

India is said to be the primary target of the campaign and Avast says it successfully blocked over 43,000 Clipsa infection attempts within the Asian country. Over 28,000 users were affected by these attacks.

Philippines and Brazil have also recorded high attacks as the security company claims that about 15,000 and 13,000 users from the two countries were infected respectively.

The cybersecurity company says that from August 2018 to July 2019, it blocked the malware from infecting computer systems over 360,000 times and protecting over 253,000 clients in the process.

It is believed that the number of people affected by the malware could be higher as the figures given are just from one security company.

Increased awareness about the Clipsa malware has seen instances of attacks decrease over the last few months. The malware attacks were very prevalent by the end of last year but the attacks have been on a decreasing trend since the start of the year.

Despite its prevalence reducing, the developers behind the malware have succeeded in stealing some cryptocurrency from innocent users. According to Avast, the hackers were successful in netting about 300,214,005 Satoshis or an equivalent of about 3 Bitcoin worth about $36,700, going by the current market rate.