Are You a Favorite Target For Cryptojacking? A Case-Control Study On The Cryptojacking Ecosystem

Abstract

Illicitly hijacking visitors’ computational resources for mining cryptocurrency via compromised websites is a consolidated activity.Previous works mainly focused on large-scale analysis of the cryptojacking ecosystem, technical means to detect browser-based mining as well as economic incentives of cryptojacking. So far, no one has studied if certain technical characteristics of a website can increase (decrease) the likelihood of being compromised for cryptojacking campaigns.In this paper, we propose to address this unanswered question by conducting a case-control study with cryptojacking websites obtained crawling the web using Minesweeper. Our preliminary analysis shows some association for certain website characteristics, however, the results obtained are not statistically significant. Thus, more data must be collected and further analysis must be conducted to obtain a better insight into the impact of these relations.