Hardly any service today works without an API that allows users to log in and then use features that are not available to unregistered users. To do this, the user can create an account that is password protected. Services such as the Google Maps API also provide access interfaces to allow application developers to easily develop very helpful features and make them available to their users.

Election campaigns are increasingly carried out in social networks to influence voters. Social bots are being used for this purpose, which raises the question of how much influence they have on voters and whether they can even endanger a democracy. Furthermore, the question arises as to who can be held responsible for this and how users of social networks can protect themselves against social bots.

Has your computer ever been slow and you couldn’t tell what the problem was? Nowadays, illicit cryptomining can cause those performance problems. It dethroned ransomware as the top cybersecurity threat in 2018. (Webroot Threat Report 2018) A simple website visit can start the mining process as a javascript running in the background of the browser or an accidentally installed malware on your computer. These two examples for different modes of illicit cryptomining are called browser-based cryptojacking and binary-based cryptomining. In both cases hash-rates can be up to medium-sized mining farms. This blog article will give an overview over binary-based cryptomining malware. In that case the mining process is embedded in the payload of a malware. Criminals hide it as good as possible which makes it hard to detect to gain a massive income. All the tools they need to start a malicious cryptomining business are easy to get in underground markets. For example Malware can be purchased for a few dollars (e.g. the average cost for an encrypted miner for Monero XMR is 35$). We will also take a quick look at how companies are legally using cryptomining to monetize web content as an alternative business model.