Forbes: Malicious mining programs allow these hackers to earn $100 million a year

In a nascent and booming industry in online crime, hackers can make $100 million apiece, including by breaking into people’s PCs and smartphones, installing ransomware on them and forcing them to mine Monero, a cryptocurrency that’s of interest to bad actors because of its anonymity.

Cisco's Talos team has detailed the scope of the problem. According to Talos, criminals are increasingly interested in mining, and this profit-making method has even caught up with their favorite ransomware. Why is this happening? Part of the reason may be that new currencies such as Monero, which is currently worth about $275 per coin, have much lower mining power than Bitcoin.

The mining process relies on computers to solve a series of mathematical puzzles; once they solve the puzzles, the coins are unlocked. The more computing power a hacker can steal or commandeer from a PC, the faster they can mine the coins.

According to Talos, an average computer can mine about $0.28 worth of Monero a day. When a hacker gains control of tens of thousands or even millions of PCs, the profits can become very high, with one hacker earning $100 million, Cisco's security department said.

According to the report, a botnet consisting of only 2,000 computers can mine $568 worth of Monero in a day, or $204,400 worth of Monero in a year. A real-life example is that a hacker earned $184,000; another hacker who obtained enough computing power could mine $262,500 worth of Monero per year.

Relying on ransomware?

Sometimes mining is easy, hacking into people's PCs and smartphones (usually through spam and phishing) often does not require the victim to take any action, such as paying ransomware. Mining is done quietly when the victim opens and installs the ransomware. Therefore, cryptocurrency mining is a quieter, simpler and more effective crime than ransomware.

Ryan Olson, director of intelligence at cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, has also seen a trend away from ransomware and toward malicious cryptocurrency mining in recent months.

From a near-term and potentially long-term perspective, a computer with a mediocre, old CPU is worth more when it’s used to quietly run cryptocurrency mining software than when it’s infected with ransomware or other programs to steal data.

Palo Alto recently revealed that an attack affected an estimated 15 million to 30 million PCs in Southeast Asia, North Africa, and South America. Once again, hackers hoped to use the computing power of the compromised systems to mine Monero.

Same trick

Although illegal cryptocurrency mining is a burgeoning market, many of the crimes are business as usual. The Talos report suggests that the crime spree began on Chinese and Russian hacker forums. Indeed, the first post secretly discussing mining via botnets was posted on a Chinese website back in November 2016.

At the same time, they have been trying and testing techniques to infect PCs. In a different case handled by Cisco, one guy ran an infected Word document that was posing as a resume. Hackers are also using powerful kits from hacker websites to infect PCs by trying to exploit system vulnerabilities in large numbers of computers. Palo Alto has discovered a powerful botnet of 15 million computers that was mostly spread through online ads.

Hackers aren't just using PCs as mining rigs. In November, Forbes spoke with a Russian developer who was able to enable 100,000 Android phones to mine cryptocurrency. He believed what he was doing was not illegal, and there has been widespread discussion about whether people who use computer power in this way should be prosecuted. (Though there is no clear definition, in the United States, hacking into someone's computer is illegal and can be considered a crime.)

For ordinary users, they should maintain good habits when using computers or smartphones to surf the Internet. This may help to eliminate the criminal activities of cryptocurrency mining to a certain extent.