Going Mining for Bitcoin

While you’ve been busy defending against ransomware, the bad guys have been scheming about new ways to steal from you. Let’s review a tactic seen in the news called bitcoin mining.

Hackers broke into servers hosted at Amazon Web Services (AWS) that holds information from multi-national, multi-billion-dollar companies, Aviva and Gemalto. The criminals were using computer power to mine the cryptocurrency, bitcoin.

Though anyone could try to mine bitcoin off their computer services, the process is very energy intensive, and could be costly in electricity expenses alone. But it’s worthwhile for many hackers because a successful attempt can be very lucrative.

To avoid the high cost of going at it alone, most bitcoin miners join a pool of different computers that combine their powers to solve complex algorithms. Successfully solving the problem generates a set number of new bitcoin, which are worth upwards of $4,300 each. Bitcoin can be mined until there are a total of 21 million bitcoin that exist.

How should you defend against this? Know your baseline and watch for anomalies. See how EventTracker caught a bitcoin miner, hidden behind a rarely used server dedicated for key-fob provisioning.