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Monero [XMR] the cryptocurrency focused on privacy which has long been a staple for hackers and nefarious internet users has come back into the limelight and (as often) is for the wrong reasons. According to a recent document by the cryptocurrency researchers Sergio Pastrana, the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil, of the King & # 39; s College of London, the main currency of privacy is also a leader in the number of illegally extracted coins. The report states that up to 4.3% of the total coins in circulation have been illegally extracted from the beginning of the currency. Entitled "A first look at Crypto-Mining's malware ecosystem: a decade of unlimited wealth," the document examines cryptocurrency extraction actions in more detail.
Researchers note in the relationship that "Our profit analysis reveals campaigns with multimillion-dollar earnings, which account for more than 4.3% of Monero with illicit extraction.We analyze the infrastructure related to the different campaigns, showing that a high percentage This ecosystem is supported by underground economies such as Pay-Per-Install services, and we also discover new techniques that allow criminals to conduct successful campaigns. "According to these figures, over 700,000 Monero coins (XMRs) have been illegally extracted. This represents approximately $ 33.4 million from current spot prices of $ 46.34 for XMR (according to Coinmarketcap data).
The most common method for extracting these coins illegally implies the hijacking of the information resources of unsuspecting Internet users and their redirection towards the extraction of XMR coins. There has been a proliferation of cryptocurrency programs that allow web browsers to extract cryptocurrency and many of these are available at an inexpensive online price. Hackers can also code malware that exploits the computing power of a system in a targeted way and redirects it to the competing hashing power to extract cryptocurrencies. As noted in the document, in the last two years between the beginning of 2017 and the end of 2018, 4.4 million malware samples and 1 million cryptocurrency mining applications were detected.
Bitcoin Mining in this way is certainly possible but Bitcoin has an extremely high hash rate that will cause a normal CPU to try to block some Bitcoins to block them, causing the victim to restart his computer and to potentially draw attention to the malware. Monero mining through the hijacking of the victim's resources is so effective because this activity can proceed in the background or when the computer is idle without compromising the usability of the machine.
