Hackers are mining Monero through Youtube and other sites
Hackers are finding new ways to take advantage of other people's resources to earn. Recently it was found out that malicious scripts even got to Youtube: through advertising on video hosting, they used 80% of the power of victim computers to mine Monero.
A small investigation of analysts showed that two video scripts fall on video hosting. The first is the development of the hidden mining service Coinhive. For his use, Coinhive himself received 30% of the profits. The second script was developed by the hackers themselves. For the introduction of Java-scripts in advertising platform, Google DoubleClick was used.
Attacks began on January 18, but the peak occurred on January 23 - that day users paid attention to the warnings of their antiviruses when they visited Youtube. Mainly affected residents of Japan, France, Italy, Spain, and Taiwan.
But hidden browser miners are not the only tool for intruders. Often infected are the computers themselves. So, recently it turned out that the Smominru botnet secretly mined Monero with the help of the EternalBlue exploit.
This exploit, abducted by Shadow Brokers hackers from the NSA in 2016, was used to create the WannaCry virus and the WannaMine miner.
Since May 2017, Smominru has infected more than 526,000 computers, most servers running Windows. Every day they extract about 24 Monero tokens. The total profit for the entire period of use was about 8900 Monero.
The choice of Monero for hidden mining is quite logical: this crypto-currency is focused on the increased anonymity of transactions.