How to secure your mining environment?

Cryptocurrency mining was in the past abused and used for harmful behavior so any sign of it is these days flagged by antivirus and defender programs. Which is good as it is better to be protected - even if it is a false positive - than not having protection at all.

In this help article, we will give you few ideas on how to secure your mining environment even further.

The first thing that absolutely needs protection is your account - either it is account you have on minerstat or on any other platform that handles any aspect of your crypto mining operation.

1. Don't share your access key with anyone (if you accidentally did, you can request access key reset).
2. Set up 2FA.
3. Regularly check your pool to see if your workers are mining properly.

Paying accounts on minerstat have an extra layer of protection - if unknown IP wants to login to the account, we send authorization request to your e-mail and don't allow new IP to login to the account until you authorize it.

On some other platforms, you can also protect your account by:

1. Using the e-mail address you didn't use on other platforms.
2. Using a strong password (the longer the better) that you didn't use on other platforms.

On msOS, which is a dedicated mining OS, we have already done a lot to secure your machine:

• Remote access is possible only through dashboard, through secure tunnel that is killed after a short period of time (couple of hours).
• SSH access is possible only through the local network.
• SSH keys/fingerprints are protected.

But generally, there are also other things you can do:

• Don't mine on personal computer. We do know what minerstat application includes, but we can never know what is in the mining clients as they are closed source.
• Don't download mining clients from unofficial sources. We make sure to always download only from official source and minerstat is there to update your mining client with the latest version. Rushing to quickly manually update and downloading from suspicious Bitcointalk threads or unofficial websites can place harmful software to your machine.

Lastly, it is also important to secure your network. We generally don't recommend to mine in household networks where computers, tablets, mobile phones, and other home smart devices are connected to the same network, but if you do, you should create a separate guest access on your router which you can isolate, so that particular user won't be able to access your other machines or devices. Also, don't mine connected to public WiFi hot spots or other shared networks, such as schools, offices, etc.