Analyzing 629,126 mining malware found that 5% of Monero was mined by infected devices

In the report released yesterday, the team detected and analyzed 629,126 malicious program samples. This analysis did not involve browser miners (cryptojacking), but only infected desktop and server devices since June last year. Researchers said that 84% of the malicious program samples detected and analyzed this time were for Monero cryptocurrency, which is the most popular cryptocurrency for malicious organizations.

By querying nine mining pools (which allow third parties to query their payment statistics), the researchers found 2,341 Monero addresses in 5,316,663 malware samples. The team estimates that these hacker groups have obtained more than $108 million worth of Monero coins in the past year.

Palo Alto Networks also pointed out that the criminal gang has used infected devices to maliciously mine about 798,613.33 Monero coins (XMR). In the past year, the computing power of infected devices has reached 19,503,823.54 hashes per second, accounting for 2% of the entire computing power of the Monero network.