Monero mining botnet earns suspected Chinese hacker $25,000 per month
Mining cryptocurrencies can be a costly investment, but creative cybercriminals have found a money-making solution. Researchers say a newly discovered botnet consisting of 15,000 machines is stealing computing power to mine increasingly valuable cryptocurrencies like Monero to enrich a hacker named “Bond007.01.” The entire “BondNet botnet” operation is netting around $25,000 per month, according to researchers at the Israeli security firm GuardiCore Labs. The victims include high-profile global companies, universities, city councils and other public institutions. They’re not losing money, just resources: Hackers have long known that when you don’t have to pay for the electricity powering the processors, cryptocurrency mining is pure profit. As bitcoin and its variants continue to rise to unprecedented value, the reward for such a scheme will increasingly outweigh the risk. The price of Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that hides transactions, has risen 2,109 percent in the last year. The last month alone has seen a 44 percent rise in […]
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