Crypto mining malware affected more than 35,000 computers

Consultants from cybersecurity firm ESET found an unknown community of bots for hidden mining of the Monero cryptocurrency, affecting more than 35,000 devices with crypto mining malware.

The bot network called “Victory Gate” has been operating in Latin America since 2019 and with its malicious program it has contaminated 90% of the information systems having their location in Peru. As reported by The Hacker News, “the victims include organizations from both the public and private sectors, including financial institutions.”

According to the consultants in their report, the space “has been active since at least May 2019 and, since then, three different variants of the initial module have been identified, in addition to approximately 10 secondary payloads that are downloaded from web hosting records.”

For its part, the antivirus firm reported that XMR mining is the main exercise of the botnet, which is carried out by the XMRig miner and uses up to 90-99% of the CPU power of computer systems.

According to the data collected, “we can determine that there are, on average, 2,000 mining devices throughout the day,” the researchers reported, adding that “if we estimate an average hash rate of 150H / s, we could say that the authors of this campaign have collected at least 80 Monero (approximately US $ 6,000) from this botnet alone.”

K.Villarroel

Source: Diariobitcoin