Millions of Android Mobiles being hacked to mine Monero Coin
Popularity of cryptocurrency influenced many cybercrimnals to mine digital coin Monero (XMR) using other android devices. They successfully hacked several devices by redirecting users to a website that helps them hack their devices to generate Monero Coin using Coinhive that offers JavaScript miner. A user can embed Coinhive JavaScript miner in his/her site. This embedded JavaScript miner starts mining Monero coin when other users visit that site. This hijacking trend is known as cryptojacking.
A mining campaign called “drive-by” redirects android users to a website that shows them a message “showing suspicious surfing behavior”. The message goes away when they solve a CAPTHA to verify themselves as human and at the same time their devices got hijacked to mine Monero coin.
After the users solve the captcha and press the continue button, they are taken to Google’s home page which looks odd redirection. According to Malwarebytes, first time the “drive-by” campaign was traced last month, but it is predicted that it has been working since November, 2017.
However there are millions of domains embedded with Coinhive JavaScript miner, Malwarebytes researchers could trace only five domains that received 8, 00,000 visitors per day and every user’s device was employed for four minutes to mine Monero. In this way, the hackers managed to generate handsome dollars per month.
Source:
https://www.ccn.com/millions-of-android-devices-hijacked-to-mine-monero/
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