The Rise of the Cryptocurrency Miners
Summary: Unit 42 researchers identified roughly 470,000 unique malware samples delivering cryptocurrency miners in Palo Alto Networks' WildFire platform, with the uptick beginning around June 2017 as Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies rose in value. Querying the top eight mining pools against 2,341 extracted Monero wallets showed 798,613.33 XMR mined, about 5% of all Monero in circulation at the time, worth an estimated $143,750,400 at $180 per Monero.
What you should know: Only 16 of those 2,341 wallets held over 10,000 XMR, meaning a small set of operators captured most of the proceeds while the rest of the infected machines produced almost nothing - and the total hashrate of roughly 19 MH/s represented about 2% of the global Monero network, enough to earn approximately $30,443 per day.
Read the original at Unit 42 Palo Alto Networks ↗
- Topics
- Zero-Days & Exploits
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