Examine our research from the last year in the ReliaQuest 2024 Annual Cyber-Threat Report
Reduce Alert Noise and False Positives
Boost your team's productivity by cutting down alert noise and false positives.
Automate Security Operations
Boost efficiency, reduce burnout, and better manage risk through automation.
Dark Web Monitoring
Online protection tuned to the need of your business.
Maximize Existing Security Investments
Improve efficiencies from existing investments in security tools.
Beyond MDR
Move your security operations beyond the limitations of MDR.
Secure with Microsoft 365 E5
Boost the power of Microsoft 365 E5 security.
Secure Multi-Cloud Environments
Improve cloud security and overcome complexity across multi-cloud environments.
Secure Mergers and Acquisitions
Control cyber risk for business acquisitions and dispersed business units.
Operational Technology
Solve security operations challenges affecting critical operational technology (OT) infrastructure.
Force-Multiply Your Security Operations
Whether you’re just starting your security journey, need to up your game, or you’re not happy with an existing service, we can help you to achieve your security goals.
Detection Investigation Response
Modernize Detection, Investigation, Response with a Security Operations Platform.
Threat Hunting
Locate and eliminate lurking threats with ReliaQuest GreyMatter
Threat Intelligence
Find cyber threats that have evaded your defenses.
Model Index
Security metrics to manage and improve security operations.
Breach and Attack Simulation
GreyMatter Verify is ReliaQuest’s automated breach and attack simulation capability.
Digital Risk Protection
Continuous monitoring of open, deep, and dark web sources to identify threats.
Phishing Analyzer
GreyMatter Phishing Analyzer removes the abuse mailbox management by automating the DIR process for you.
Integration Partners
The GreyMatter cloud-native Open XDR platform integrates with a fast-growing number of market-leading technologies.
Unify and Optimize Your Security Operations
ReliaQuest GreyMatter is a security operations platform built on an open XDR architecture and designed to help security teams increase visibility, reduce complexity, and manage risk across their security tools, including on-premises, clouds, networks, and endpoints.
Blog
Company Blog
Case Studies
Brands of the world trust ReliaQuest to achieve their security goals.
Data Sheets
Learn how to achieve your security outcomes faster with ReliaQuest GreyMatter.
eBooks
The latest security trends and perspectives to help inform your security operations.
Industry Guides and Reports
The latest security research and industry reports.
Podcasts
Catch up on the latest cybersecurity podcasts, and mindset moments from our very own mental performance coaches.
Solution Briefs
A deep dive on how ReliaQuest GreyMatter addresses security challenges.
White Papers
The latest white papers focused on security operations strategy, technology & insight.
Videos
Current and future SOC trends presented by our security experts.
Events & Webinars
Explore all upcoming company events, in-person and on-demand webinars
ReliaQuest ResourceCenter
From prevention techniques to emerging security trends, our comprehensive library can arm you with the tools you need to improve your security posture.
Threat Research
Get the latest threat analysis from the ReliaQuest Threat Research Team. ReliaQuest ShadowTalk Weekly podcast featuring discussions on the latest cybersecurity news and threat research.
Shadow Talk
ReliaQuest's ShadowTalk is a weekly podcast featuring discussions on the latest cybersecurity news and threat research. ShadowTalk's hosts come from threat intelligence, threat hunting, security research, and leadership backgrounds providing practical perspectives on the week's top cybersecurity stories.
March 26, 2024
About ReliaQuest
We bring our best attitude, energy and effort to everything we do, every day, to make security possible.
Leadership
Security is a team sport.
No Show Dogs Podcast
Mental Performance Coaches Derin McMains and Dr. Nicole Detling interview world-class performers across multiple industries.
Make It Possible
Make It Possible reflects our focus on bringing cybersecurity awareness to our communities and enabling the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.
Careers
Join our world-class team.
Press and Media Coverage
ReliaQuest newsroom covering the latest press release and media coverage.
Become a Channel Partner
When you partner with ReliaQuest, you help deliver world-class cybersecurity solutions.
Contact Us
How can we help you?
A Mindset Like No Other in the Industry
Many companies tout their cultures; at ReliaQuest, we share a mindset. We focus on four values every day to make security possible: being accountable, helpful, adaptable, and focused. These values drive development of our platform, relationships with our customers and partners, and further the ReliaQuest promise of security confidence across our customers and our own teams.
More results...
Cryptomining has become a popular method for attackers to profit from compromised systems. By installing cryptocurrency mining software on a host, attackers can utilize the host’s CPU and GPU resources to “mine” cryptocurrency, which can then be exchanged for non-digital currency or used for purchases. The attack has become so prevalent, it has earned its own technique name: “cryptojacking.”
It is important to quickly identify when a host is running cryptomining software so the host’s performance does not suffer from high resource utilization. A key indicator is the network traffic. Most attackers connect their miners to a mining pool, a centralized server that coordinates mining among multiple hosts to share resources. The miners will reach out to the pool server at an interval to receive updates and send mining data.
But how can we detect these cryptomining connections?
Mining traffic used to be easy to identify, as most pool servers listened on distinct ports such as 3333 or 7777, which came to be associated with cryptomining traffic. However, new pools have started to use different ports to avoid detection. Some even disguise their connections by receiving data over port 25 or SSL on port 443. While the well-known ports are still in use by many pools, the port number alone is not a high confidence indicator of mining traffic. Other monitoring tools such as deep packet inspection technologies may also not be able to identify mining traffic encrypted over SSL.
The easiest way to detect cryptomining traffic would be to monitor for connections to the pool servers by using a threat intelligence list of all known mining pool server IP addresses. However, a comprehensive list of mining pools from threat intelligence vendors can be difficult to find or not exist at all, and maintaining your own list requires a lot of manual work and will quickly become outdated.
We have found a few reasons that may explain why cryptomining pool threat intelligence is not widely available and difficult to develop:
We set out to address these issues by building a solution that automatically enumerates the mining pools and their subdomains and translates them to IP addresses for use as a threat intelligence feed. We used several different collection techniques to make the information as accurate and timely as we could, given the known difficulties. Our methodology is below.
The first step is to gather a list of active mining pools. There are several public websites that aggregate statistics from the mining pools of various cryptocurrencies. We can then automate web requests and API calls to the sites to download the mining statistics, which include the active pools and their domains and websites.
The mining pool websites usually contain information on how to connect a miner to the pool, which details the pool server’s domain or IP address to use in the miner’s configuration. We observed that some websites use similar web frameworks and store the information in the same location. We can automate web requests and API calls to download the web content of the mining pool websites and parse out the pool server’s domains.
If we cannot find the pool server domains on the website, we can still attempt to find them a different way.
The domain of the mining pool website is often not the same as the domain for the individual pool servers, which receive the mining traffic. We observed that most pool server domains follow a similar naming convention that is derived from the pool’s website domain:
Most pool server domains are comprised of the website domain prepended with specific strings. These subdomains typically contain keywords that reference the cryptocurrency or cryptomining in general.
Using our list of active pool domains, we can pipe them into several open-source subdomain enumeration tools, such as findomain and Sublist3r. These tools query a variety of sources to find any subdomains related to a specific root domain. We can then filter the output to show only relevant subdomains that contain cryptocurrency keywords.
The final step is to combine our lists of enumerated pool server domains and resolve them to IP addresses.
We now have an up-to-date threat intelligence list of cryptomining pool server domains and IP addresses. This list can be integrated into detection technologies to alert on connections to the IP addresses or DNS lookups for the domains. Network technologies, such as firewalls, can also ingest the lists and proactively block connections to the pool servers.
GreyMatter, ReliaQuest’s SaaS security platform, provides a curated threat intelligence list of high confidence indicators, now including indicators for cryptomining pools, that can be integrated with network and endpoint technologies to increase the fidelity of detections in your environment.
ReliaQuest GreyMatter automatically collects, normalizes, and prioritizes threat intelligence in a consumable format for your SIEM and EDR. ReliaQuest GreyMatter processes all IoCs and only sends those with the highest fidelity, so your security controls report fewer false positives.
To learn more about prioritizing, integrating, and automating threat intelligence across the security lifecycle, get the white paper.