Higher-education institutions are the new battleground for cryptomining-related hacking, according to a newly published report from security firm Vectra Networks Inc.

A full 60 percent of all cryptomining software detections occurred in college and university networks, followed well behind by entertainment and leisure on 6 percent, financial services and technology at 3 percent each and healthcare at 2 percent. The results were detailed in Vectra’s 2018 RSA Conference Edition of its Attacker Behavior Industry Report, based on data from 4.5 million devices across 246 opt-in enterprise customers.

The report also found that the highest volume of attacker behaviors per industry was higher education, with 3,715 detections found per 10,000 devices. That was followed by engineering at 2,918 detections per 10,000 devices. Those results were attributed to command-and-control activity in higher education and internal reconnaissance activity in engineering.

Daniel Basile, executive director of the Security Operations Center at ‎Texas A&M University System, said that “students are exceedingly intelligent and very enterprising. This is a time that many of them are working with new technologies, and it is not surprising that they utilizing their machines for cryptocurrency mining.”

“However, there is also a large increase in websites that will cryptojack your PC while you are on their website,” Basile added. “This new trend of mining bitcoin for revenue instead of ads can directly affect students. With the increase in online video streaming resources, this creates a large amount of cryptocurrency mining.”

Command-and-control activity in colleges and universities also topped the list with 2,205 detections per 10,000 devices, four times above the industry average of 460 detections per 10,000 devices. Conversely, government and technology sectors had the lowest detection rates, with 496 and 349 detections per 10,000 devices, respectively. Overall, though, detections were up across all industries.

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