Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Systems Hacked, $620,000 of DogeCoin Mined

Dogecoin, for those who don’t spend their time indulging in Internet meta-memes, may seem like harmless nerdery. But for one enterprising hacker, it’s created a small fortune—at the price of annoying a lot of systems administrators.

A pair of researchers at Dell’s Secureworks security division have traced a collection of malware-infected storage devices to a hacker who has amassed more than $620,000 worth of the currency, which they say he mined from those hijacked machines and others. They say that stash, largely created in just two months earlier this year, may be the largest cryptocurrency hoard ever mined from the computers of unwitting victims. (Wow.)

“To date, this incident is the single most profitable, illegitimate mining operation,” Pat Litke writes in a blog post explaining the findings. The two researchers concede, however, that they can only prove a small fraction of the coins were mined from the hacked storage boxes, and it’s not clear what other machines—compromised or not—the hacker used to mine such significant Doge riches.

No comments: