Hackers find unpatched servers to secretly mine $17,000 in Monero per month
Secretly mining cryptocurrency by using the machines of unsuspecting victims is a malicious ploy that was invented almost as soon as cryptocurrency came into being. Just this week, two such schemes surfaced. An operation has been infecting Windows web servers with a silent Monero miner since at least May 2017 to net $63,000 worth of the currency, say researchers from cybersecurity firm ESET. Cryptocurrency mining, put simply, is when powerful computer processors solve immense math problems that take considerable time and energy. Solving the problems rewards miners with digital currency like bitcoin, Monero and so on. It costs money to power the computers that do the mining, so hackers who sneakily employ other people’s machines are avoiding expenses. The big electricity bill that results is suddenly another person’s problem. New research from ESET shows that hundreds of unpatched servers were infected with a known vulnerability — labeled CVE-2017-7296 — and used to mine Monero for […]
The post Hackers find unpatched servers to secretly mine $17,000 in Monero per month appeared first on Cyberscoop.
Continue reading Hackers find unpatched servers to secretly mine $17,000 in Monero per month