The 5% of Monero in circulation has been extracted through malware, search results

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A June 11 report by company and network security firm Palo Alto Networks found that around 5 percent of all Monero (XMR) in circulation was mischievously extracted.

According to the research, mining was done through cryptojacking, the practice of using the processing power of other users 'computers to extract cryptocurrencies without the owners' permission.

Josh Grunzweig of the unit threat research team 42 collected data – about 470,000 unique samples – on how many cryptojacking miners were identified on the Palo Alto Network WildFire platform.

The report reports 3,773 e-mails related to mining pools, 2,995 mining pool URLs, 2,341 XRM portfolios, 981 Bitcoin wallets (BTC), ELETON portfolios (131), 44 Ethereum portfolios (ETHs) and 28 Litecoin portfolios (LTCs) ).

According to Grunzweig, Monero has an "incredible monopoly" on the cryptocurrencies hit by the malware, with a total of $ 175 million mischievously mined (about 5% of all the Moneros now in circulation). Monero has a market capitalization of about $ 1.9 billion, trading around $ 119 and about 10 percent in a 24-hour period at the time of printing.

Of the 2,341 Monero wallets found, only 55 percent (or 1,278) has more than 0.01 XMR (currently worth about $ 1.19).

The report also notes that the data does not include web-based Monero miners or other miners they could not access, which means that 5 percent is probably too low for a calculation.

Distribution of cryptocurrencies targeted by malicious miners

Distribution of cryptocurrencies targeted by malicious miners. Source: Palo Alto Networks

According to the report, the total hashrate for Monero's cryptojacking – about 19 mega-hash per second (MH / s) bringing about $ 30.443 per day – is about 2 percent of the global hashing power of the network Monero. The report states that the first three sources of hashrate mines around $ 2,737, $ 2,022 and $ 1,596 each day.

In an e-mail to Cointelegraph, Justin Ehrenhofer of the Monero Malware Response WorkGroup wrote that since Monero is "built without explicit use cases," people "can take advantage of Monero's privacy and work evidence accessible for their personal gain. illegitimate. "

For this reason, the working group on malware is a body of volunteers that works to educate users of encryption on how to avoid malware and be encrypted:

"The Monero community is interested in helping victims of unwanted extrapolation of the system and other nefarious actions […] We will never be able to prevent every machine from being compromised. The proportion of coins that is estimated to be mined with Monero speaks to a large extent of the number of machines that are compromised. In addition to extracting Monero, they could send spam and monitor users. We hope that our contributions will limit unwanted behavior at the source ".

Yesterday, the Japanese police reported opening an investigation into a Monero encryption case with Coinhive mining software. Last week, a security team found that over 40,000 computers were infected with mining malware, including Monero, from industries such as finance, education, and government.

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