One of the things that make cryptocurrencies disruptive in the world of finance is its ability to get rid of a third party in confirming transactions. Given the fact that all transactions are public and are confirmed by miners, it has changed the game completely in the last 9 years.
However, there are problems along the way. For instance, you have the fact that mining needs a lot of energy. Often times, regulators are now looking closely at mining activities because of the impact that it has on the environment not to mention how much electricity it is going to suck from a particular area.
But not all crypto mining activities need massive amounts of electricity and computation power. There are those cryptocurrencies that can be mined even by an ordinary computer at home.
And for this reason, there were hackers that took advantage of these cryptocurrencies in order to place a malware on a particular computer while the victim unknowingly mines cryptocurrencies for the hackers. The hackers were able to earn around $2 million in a matter of two years and have affected over 1 million computers in the country.
According to a report, the police arrested 20 suspects who all work for a computer technology company. They were able to gain control of a number of computers by displaying ads and letting their victims install the plugins. The malware was then embedded inside these internet browser plugins that have been developed for different purposes like faster browsing speed. It is said that the display ads were able to reach 5 million users in China.
The hackers were able to mine a total of 26 million digibyte of siacon and decred tokens. The hackers chose lesser-known cryptocurrencies in order to allow the mining process to be less obvious. This means that the victims aren’t aware that their computer is already infected and part of its computational power is already dedicated to mining procedures.
Developed a Network
The hackers were well connected in their operations. They had the help of 100 agents in order to propagate the malware. Among those that were part of the operation included those who are working in internet cafes.
Used by UNICEF
UNICEF already used this method in order to raise funds for their campaign. UNICEF, instead of asking money, turned to crypto mining in order to generate funds. Visitors were asked to contribute their computational power instead in order to raise funds. What it did was made use of people’s computers in order to mine Monero.
It wasn’t the first time that hackers are looking for computers to mine cryptocurrencies such as siacoin. There was also a report that another group of hackers was busted by authorities for hacking over 100,000 computers from internet cafes. They were able to do this by working with local computer maintenance firms.
Crypto jacking is a serious problem in today’s crypto market. Computers could easily get affected without them knowing it. We can expect that more hackers are going to do this especially now that there are thousands of other cryptocurrencies that can be mined even by ordinary computers.
