Vectra analyzed five industries where crypto mining – which the blog post defines as “an opportunistic attack behavior that uses botnets to create a large pool of computing power”, incorrectly combining crypto mining and cryptojacking into one use case – has occurred from August 2017 to January 2018, finding that “higher education” sees more mining than the other four industries combined.
Your opinion?
There's a few explanations for this that I can think of. Well-funded universities often have powerful computers and campuses full of computer labs. My feeling when I attended school was that there wasn't as much oversight as you see in corporate sectors. Often times, a goofy, absent-minded professor runs a lab with just a couple low-paid assistants. Industry tends to take security more seriously.
Then there's the fact that cryptocurrency is big with millennials (including college students). It's no secret that college kids are spending student loan money on crypto. They're probably buying mining rigs, too.
Maybe "higher education" folks are also smarter -- i.e. they see the writing on the wall that cryptocurrency is the future.
