Detected in China, a malicious software aimed at hidden mining, brought its creators more than $2 million in 2 years. Police of the Chinese city of Dalian arrested 20 employees of an IT firm suspected of cryptojacking millions of PCs.
How Come?
Hackers have allegedly implanted a code into the software of an internet browser extension, which was designed to speed up the work of the application. Following the installation, several million computers were infected once users clicked on a pop-up advertisement it generated. Thanks to the scheme which has been running for around 2 years, 26 million DigiByte, Siacoin and Decred tokens were mined.
Why These Coins?
It’s highly likely that hackers opted to mine those cryptocurrencies as opposed to better-known ones because of the relatively small computing power they require. It, therefore, becomes more difficult for users to detect malicious activity. Hackers also managed to create a network which included more than 100 agents that helped to spread the malicious malware, through working relationships with internet cafes.
Recently in China, another group of hackers was discovered and arrested, working in conjunction with local service companies to hack more than 100,000 computers belonging to various Internet cafes - also for mining Siacoin.
It also became known that a decentralized crypto exchange Bancor was attacked by hackers, as a result of which $13 million worth of cryptocurrencies have been stolen. Several hours after the Bancor incident, MyEtherWallet, one of the most popular crypto asset wallets warned its users to immediately transfer their funds to another account. The company suspected HOLA, free VPN extension for Google Chrome, to have been hacked which exposed data of MyEtherWallet users for intruders to collect for at least 5 hours.