In 2017 cryptocurrency is stronger than ever and is expected to grown in popularity and value in the following year. Not everything is peaches and cream though, since the growth in value also means that more and more people with malicious intent will be after these resources.

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Furthermore, the nature of this currency is somewhat dubious, since it is used by a lot of cyber criminals to pay for illegal goods on the Dark Web. This is due to the almost guaranteed anonymity of the people involved in the transaction, which makes it quite difficult to track the hypothetical transaction.

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Due to the fact that more and more people are investing in cryptocurrency and that there are now companies that are strictly focused on mining and trading this new type of currency, they are a juicy target for cyber crooks. 

If you intend to invest your regular currency into farming BitCoin or some of its competitors, you should be aware of the risks. Even if you are not planning to invest in mining, you may still be under threat, as less-than-moral miners might attempt to hijack your PC and broadband to speed up their own mining. 

1. Web Mining 

A website whose security has been breached can be used to hide a small script to pray on its traffic. The script engages the resources at the user’s disposal directly through their web browser and mines the desired cryptocurrency for the hacker.

This type of mining might will impact a lot of things in 2018. For one, we might see it as a new website monetization method. Website owners might offer to turn of the script for users who are under a paid subscription. We also might be offered services or media in exchange for mining currency. 

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2. Spearfishing 

While this malware is targeting financial executives of cryptocurrency firms, it is still a big deal. Namely, hackers are attempting to get executives to click an email attachment that automatically installs malware on their PCs In this email, the executives are offered a new position and while most will know better than to click an attachment they got from an unknown party, some that are less than vigilant may fall prey to this ploy. 

3. Ransomware and Cryptocurrency 

For those that are not familiar with Ransomware, it is a form of malicious attack that captures user data and then blackmails the user for cash to give them back. Due to the nature of cryptocurrency and the fact that it is so hard to track transactions we can expect that more and more hackers will request ransoms in BitCoin or other virtual currency. If this trend catches on, we might even see a rise in overall purchase of cryptocurrency.

4. Mining Gone Wild 

Companies are surely going to be focused more than individual users as targets of attacks that have one thing in mind – mining. The more resources hackers gain access to, the fatter their virtual wallets get in a shorter period of time.

We can also expect illegal use of company and government resources. More and more miners are going to hit the scene and they will need one thing to make their money – stable and free electricity. Unused resources of government organizations may be the perfect solution to their problems.

5. The Fall of ICO (Initial Coin Offering) 

ICO is basically crowdfunding through cryptocurrency and it really exploded in popularity in 2017. In 2018 we might see a steady decline of this approach of funding projects due to a number of reasons. While using cryptocurrency to fund online projects might seem like a match made in heaven, we are yet to see any significant projects funded this way succeed.

Furthermore, this kind of investment isn’t regulated by, well, anyone. It all goes down to the investor assessing the feasibility of an idea and actually putting their trust in the project owners to provide them with a return on investment. This lack of guarantee is slowly showing its ugly side and investors are not going to like it.

Even though we entered a cryptocurrency golden age, we can still expect a lot of problems until we get a stable currency that isn’t easily put to malicious use or farmed by leveraging resources that don’t belong to the people getting the currency.

There is room for improvement of security all around, but this improvement will have to deal with the amazing growth in both value and popularity of cryptocurrency, which will be a challenge to say the least.