Cryptocurrency Mining Smominru Botnet Infected more than 500,000 Windows Machines

Security researchers from Proofpoint detected Monero miners that spread using the infamous EternalBlue Exploit. Attackers using persistent Botnet dubbed Smominru to spread the infection through all possible exploits.

The year 2017 is well known for Ransomware, data breaches and Hacking attacks targetting Cryptocurrency exchanges. In 2017 WannaCry Ransomware uses the same EternalBlue vulnerability to exploit a number of windows machine.

Mining cryptocurrencies in a legitimate way are quite resource consuming process, so attackers demanding ransom payments and infecting other computers to mine the cryptocurrencies.

Attackers now even abusing google DoubleClick ads and running Malvertising Champaign into high traffic website to run the coinhive crypto miner and other web-based miners that connect to some private tools.

Also Read Coincheck Cryptocurrency Exchange Hacked & Stolen More than $500 Million

The bot was spotted at the end of May 2017 and miner’s use of Windows Management Infrastructure is unusual among coin mining malware. Based on the hash power associated with Monero payment address indicates crooks already mined more than 8,900 Monero.

Researchers said At least 25 hosts were conducting attacks via EternalBlue (CVE-2017-0144 SMB) to infect new nodes and increase the size of the botnet. The hosts all appear to sit behind the network autonomous system AS63199.

Smominru C&C Server and Distribution

Smominru C&C Servers are hosted by SharkTech and the botnet affects more than 526,000 windows servers and nodes are distributed worldwide and predominantly in Russia, India, and Taiwan.

Also Read How to Exploit Windows Remote PC with EternalBlue & DoublePulsar Exploit through Metasploit

The botnet approximately mines 24 Monero every day and researchers said most of them are windows servers that impact critical business infrastructure.

At GBHackers, we discovered one such fake site ( www.1337x.io ) of the very popular torrent sharing site 1337x doing this. The problem is, when you google this site’s name, the first result you get is the fake website’s address. So, we reported this site immediately to Google and the next day, the script was removed from the source code.

Now even the Chrome extension started mining cryptocurrency, a chrome extension Archive Poster with more than 105,000 users Caught injecting an in-browser cryptocurrency miner.