Is Russia attacked by mining viruses?

Up to 30% of computers in Russia are infected with the Bitcoin-mining malware, claims German Klimenko, the RF president’s Internet adviser, in the interview with RNS. Klimenko believes that the virus has infected not just about a third of 20-30 million of computers in Moscow, but the same number of devices in other regions, with Apple products being the most fortunate – the virus is not found in MacBooks and iPhones as often as in other devices.

The adviser noted that the ones who are to blame in infection are the users who install different plugins and extensions on their devices.

However, most had skeptical attitude to his claims. For example, the representatives of Kaspersky Labs commented on RBC that Bitcoin-mining viruses are indeed widespread, but not to such extent. Six percent of those who use the company’s products were infected with miner viruses in 2017, although the info on all the computers in the country cannot be collected by Kaspersky Labs and its experts.

Vyacheslav Medvedev, the leading analyst of the Dr Web’s development department, is another one to express his opinion on the matter. According to his words, no less than 1% of devices in Russia are infected with various types of viruses, but 20-30% would be an epidemic everybody would know about.

The interviewed experts stressed that mining malware tends to occupy a lot of computing power and would have been quickly detected by this feature. This opinion is shared by Dmitry Marinichev, Russia’s Internet ombudsman.