Hackers Exploiting Microsoft Servers to Mine Monero - Makes $63,000 In 3 Months

Someone made over $60,000 hijacking people’s computers to mine cryptocurrency

Mining cryptocurrencies might be costly investment since it requires a massive amount of computing power, and consequently hackers have begun using malware which occupies computing resources of computers that it hijacks to create a lot of bucks in electronic money.

Security researchers in security company ESET have seen one such malware which infected hundreds of Windows web servers having a malicious cryptocurrency miner and aided cybercriminals made greater than $63,000 value of Monero (XMR) in only 3 months.

According to a report published by ESET now, cybercriminals simply made alterations to valid open source Monero mining applications and also exploited a known vulnerability in Microsoft IIS 6.0 to covertly set up the miner on unpatched Windows servers.

Thus, hackers are only targeting unpatched machines running Windows Server 2003 to create them a part of a botnet, that has already helped them produced over $63,000 value of Monero.

Since the vulnerability is to an internet server, and this is supposed to be visible from the web, it may be obtained and exploited by anybody.

The recently discovered malware mines Monero with a whole market valuation of roughly $1.4 billion, which will be much from Bitcoin in market capitalisation, but cybercriminals' love for Monero is because of its focus on solitude.

Contrary to Bitcoin, Monero delivers untraceable trades and can be anonymous cryptocurrency on the planet these days.

Another motive for hackers favouring Monero is the fact that it utilizes a proof-of-work algorithm named CryptoNight, which matches server or computer CPUs and GPUs, whereas Bitcoin mining demands particular mining hardware.

Nonetheless, this isn't the first time when analysts have seen such malware mining Monero by resisting computing tools of computers that are compromised.

You can learn more about the vulnerability here.
https://blog.eset.ie/2017/09/28/money-making-machine-monero-mining-malware/
https://javiermunhoz.com/blog/2017/04/17/cve-2017-7269-iis-6.0-webdav-remote-code-execution.html