Adylkuzz impact and prevalence is much lower than WannaCry

There have been reports of another threat, known as Adylkuzz, leveraging MS17-010 to propagate to vulnerable machines. MS17-010 is the same vulnerability used by WannaCry to propagate across networks, however this is where the similarity with Adylkuzz ends.

Symantec customers using IPS have been proactively protected against attempts to exploit MS17-010.

Cryptocurrency mining

The main purpose of Adylkuzz is to mine Monero, a cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin. Adylkuzz installs a known cryptocurrency miner called cpuminer on compromised machines. Adylkuzz performs its mining operations in the background therefore infected users are unlikely to notice its presence. However, mining operations are CPU intensive so having a miner running on your machine could lead to performance issues.

While a nuisance, Adylkuzz does not have the same impact on compromised machines as ransomware threats which could lead to data loss and wide-scale disruption.

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