The blockchain gets closer to reality!
Shady businesses create a glimpse on the future:
The internet itself, websites as a marketing instrument, images and galleries, videos and portals, streaming and pay-per-view - what all these once new solutions have in common?
image found on the blog of VideoPak
A rather shady business used them early on and intensively at that. The porn industry. Yes, maybe you do not think it is shady or what ever - not my reasoning here.
My reasoning is, that there are a lot of signals - or better put - glimpses on adaption of new technologies.
And sometimes these businesses/business models set at the borders of our societies' conventions (or beyond them) are the first to kick in true adaption.
And such a business model/business just revealed to me an "Adaption glimpse": Malware mining.
Yes, it not new - there have been many incidents - yet, it is new to me and reminded me, that adaption sometimes kicks in not only with the "early adopters", but with certain industries we tend to oversee.
The cybersecurity company proofpoint has just released a report, about mining malware -
that is where the malware "only" wants the resources of your computer - not any data or hijacking of your machine.
image under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, found at wikipedia
So what is going on in detail?
image found on Pixabay
The malware called Adylkuzz (TROJ_COINMINER.WN) seems to exploit the same weakness as the heavily reported WannaCry virus that hit so many computers (note: They were only "hit" because they were not updated; its the poor controller driven IT strategies & ops that our corps think are so smart that made this possible).
But instead of using this exploit to take control of the machine or encrypting files on it - it installs a miner for Monero (XMR; a digital currency more opaque than bitcoin) and lets it run and produce Moneros - a lot of them, actually. And sends these to an address.
And that's how this ingenious person/group make 1,000 to 1,500 Moneros a day (not known is the number of infected machines) on one Monero address.
Today (23rd of May, 2017, 1831 CET), 1,000 Moneros are worth $43,560