Each wallet has an address which can be used to sign the wallet into a mining pool and send the profit of the mining process to the wallet. Another important aspect of crypto mining is the required hardware. Bitcoin is likely the most popular crypto currency and mining it is practically impossible using only regular CPU.
To mine Bitcoin a specific hardware is required or requires the use of GPU which allows more parallelization of the computation, thus improving the mining process. Other crypto currencies, like Monero, are newer and can be mined using regular CPU. In recent attacks we have seen a lot of malware using it to mine Monero. Bitcoin is the arguably the most popular crypto currency that exists, but still we have not seen a single attack trying to infect servers with Bitcoin mining malware. Besides the fact that special hardware is required to mine Bitcoin while regular CPU can be used to mine the crypto currencies mentioned above, there is another notable reason.
Bitcoin transactions are not private and coins can be traced back along the transaction chain. All the cryptocurrencies that we saw attackers trying to mine are more anonymous. This makes these anonymous crypto currencies a favorite for hackers to mine illegally on vulnerable servers. Monero is also used as a way to launder money made illegally.
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For example there were reports that Bitcoins earned by the WannaCry ransomware were moved to Monero, probably as a means of hiding the source of the money. Next, we will follow an attack found in the wild, and through it try to understand the way that a crypto-mining malware works. The following attack figure 3 was found in the post body of an HTTP request that was trying to exploit an RCE vulnerability to send a wget command to download and run a script. Figure 3- Code injected in a parameter trying to download and run a crypto-mining script.
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First, it kills processes that are running in the background of the server figure 4. These processes include mostly competing crypto miners, but also security controls and processes that use a lot of CPU. The way this script identifies competing crypto miners is either by killing the processes with known crypto-mining software, or by killing processes that include specific IPs or parts of crypto wallets. Figure 4- The script kills processes that are running in the background. Figure 5- Gaining persistence by adding a new cron job.
Figure 6- Downloading and running the crypto-mining malware.
Figure 7- Dynamic configuration file containing the mining pool and the crypto wallet of the attacker. In the downloaded configuration files we found, there were active Monero wallets that belonged to the attackers. By tracing the wallets and the mining pools, we saw the amount of money made using crypto mining.
Figure The wallet was suspended from the pool due to botnet activity. Most of the RCE payloads in our data contained crypto miners for Monero. But there were some attacks in which the payload was a crypto miner for other currencies. Courtois, N. In: Galbraith, S. Cryptography and Coding Dadda, L.
ACM Google Scholar. In: DATE , pp. Feldhofer, M. In: Meersman, R. OTM Workshops.
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The source explicitly mentions that the date provided may not necessarily be representative: the data provided is based on geo-location and assumes the IP addresses of miners matches the country they are currently residing in. This comes back in the use of VPN: the source lists it tried to mitigated effects of miners trying to hide their IP address. This was especially visible in the Chinese province of Zhejiang - one of three provinces the sources used to represent China. The source states that the figures shown here should "collectively represent approximately 37 percent of Bitcoin total hashrate over the examined period.
Bitcoin BTC price history from to March 26, Unique cryptocurrency wallets created on Blockchain. Bitcoin BTC market capitalization as of February 22, As a Premium user you get access to the detailed source references and background information about this statistic. As a Premium user you get access to background information and details about the release of this statistic.
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Cryptocurrency mining revenue as of February 15, 2021
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New Research: Crypto-mining Drives Almost 90% of All Remote Code Execution Attacks
A majority of Bitcoin mining occurred in China, according to IP addresses from so-called hashers that used certain Bitcoin mining pools in Hashing refers to the amount of processing power that PCs use to build the blockchain: the more blocks of verified transactions that are processed or "hashed", the more Bitcoin - the reward for this verification process - is being mined.
Simply put, the higher the hashrate - or the hash power of the overall network - the more secure it is. These figures attempt to show where most of this hashing - and, consequently, Bitcoin mining - occurs. These figures are different from numbers showing interest in Bitcoin and which global countries traded this cryptocurrency the most.