Ah, those were the days, when you could steal a bit of a company’s server power and mine some valuable bitcoin all for yourself.
During a presentation at a conference last week, British cybersecurity experts had some tales to tell of surreptitious and sometimes illegal bitcoin mining in the time before huge computing power was required to turn a profit at the activity. In January 2015 the British cybersecurity firm Darktrace was called to investigate a possible intrusion in the systems of an Italian bank. Darktrace uses artificial intelligence techniques to detect aberrations in computer systems.
The firm discovered streams of data were being transmitted from one of the bank’s servers to a European crime syndicate, Dave Palmer, director of technology at Darktrace, told the Research and Applied AI Summit in London July 30. “It was a fairly well known European criminal botnet,” said Palmer, director of technology at Darktrace. “The data was not customer data; it turned out to be a fairly buggy implementation of bitcoin mining software.”