They benefit cybercriminals by stealing information for subsequent sale and help absorb infected PCs into botnets.
[1][2][3] Web threats can be divided into two primary categories, based on delivery method – push and pull.
[4] Push-based threats use spam, phishing, or other fraudulent means to lure a user to a malicious (often spoofed) website which then collects information and/or injects malware.
Push attacks use phishing, DNS poisoning (or pharming), and other means to appear to originate from a trusted source.
Precisely-targeted push-based web threats are often referred to as spear phishing to reflect the focus of their data gathering attack.
In other push-based web threats, malware authors use social engineering such as enticing subject lines that reference holidays, popular personalities, sports, pornography, world events and other hot topics to persuade recipients to open the email and follow links to malicious websites or open attachments with malware that accesses the Web.
One of the most recent mobile technological wonders The Coinhive software was throttled to use only twenty percent of a visiting computer's CPU to avoid detection.
[11] German researchers have defined cryptojacking as websites executing cryptomining on visiting users' computers without prior consent.