Police arrested 16 person hacker group for illegally mining cryptocurrency at Internet cafes. The hacker group compromised thousands of system in more than 30 cities across the country and earned more than 5 million yuan worth ($800,000).
How Attackers Installed Crypto Miners
The hacker group conducted a well-planned operation to deploy the Cryptocurrency miners in computers at Internet Cafes.
Liu Hua is the administrator of the criminal gang designed the mining procedures, Zhou Mou and Xiong Mou work in Internet Cafes and they promoted the mining programs. An unnamed computer service company used their privileges on access to computers to deploy the miners.
Liu an Internet cafe owner first spotted the abnormal resource usage and the same situation experienced by other Internet cafes in the city and they reported to Ruian police.
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Ruian police detected the hidden mining program that runs automatically on all the computers and mines Siacoin “After an investigation, the computer maintenance of all affected Internet cafes are invariably undertaken by a computer maintenance company. The person in charge of the company, Ruan Zou, who is 35 years old was arrested.” reports hangzhou.
Still, the investigation is in progress, now the malware spread across more than 30 cities in China and more than 100 computer maintenance firms in the country being allegedly involved.
Cryptomining attacks are increasing rapidly, attackers use to compromise servers, personal computers, Chrome extensions and web portals to mine cryptocurrencies such as Monero.
The Internet oldest hacker group Rex Mundi who was active from 2012 was taken down in joint operation supported by the Europol and the Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce (J-CAT).
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