Chinese Police Arrest Malware Developers Who Hacked Crypto Worth $2 Million
They are responsible for hacking millions of computers to hack a total of $2 million in cryptocurrencies.
Computers were initially infected with a mining program and a mining monitoring software — whenever the latter detected CPU utilization below 50%, the former would silently start mining in the background. The cycle was repeated endlessly, with all the proceeds being sent back to the hackers.
In a joint effort involving many Chinese law enforcement agencies, 20 individuals were apprehended, out of which 11 were released on bail, and 9 were detained. The culprits are responsible for illegally controlling more than 389 million computers across China, while a total of 1 million computers were silently mining for the hacker group.
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The security team at Tencent Keeper Program has been credited for alerting authorities to the hack. On January 3rd, the team first detected a game plug-in containing a Trojan horse program. The operation ran uninterrupted for 2 years during which it mined more than 26 million coins — a mix between DigiByte (DGB), Decred (DCR), and Siacoin (SC), — totaling more than 15 million Chinese yuan.
Credit – CCN