A new NSFOCUS report indicates that the declining price of cryptocurrencies in 2018 prompted threat actors to stop using botnet resources  for cryptomining attacks – as these were getting less and less profitable – and increasingly use them to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks instead.

Despite this, the number of DDoS attacks last year actually declined by 28.4% compared to the year before, in large part because of better defenses against reflection attacks. The magnitude of DDoS attacks did increase in 2018, which can be explained by the rise of DDoS-as-a-Service.

Richard Zhao of NSFOCUS believes that the uncovered correlation between cryptomining and DDoS attacks “can help us better predict and prepare for DDoS attacks. Attackers are after profits and as we watch bitcoin fluctuate, we will continue to see this correlation pop up.”

Read more: The correlation between DDoS attacks and cryptomining