Hackers Fake Computational Power to Steal Cryptocurrencies Directly From Mining Pools

A new attack targeted equihash mining pools that use vulnerable equihashverifier to verify the miner’s shares. The logic vulnerability in the verifier allows an attacker to fake the mining shares without using so much computing power.

Probably the vulnerability may have a huge impact as the verifier equihashverify was previously used by zcash and other new cryptocurrencies.

360 Core Security published a report along with the PoC explaining the vulnerability, according to their report it is not a vulnerability of Equihash, but a vulnerability of the implementation of Equihash solution verifier.

It was developed by University of Luxembourg’s. it is an is a memory-oriented Proof-of-Work algorithm and in April 2016 ZCash integrated Equihash for security, privacy, and ASIC miner resistance.

The vulnerability resides in how the algorithm computes, hdr stands for the block header and soln to determine the solutions that users submitted to Equihash. But the algorithm contains multiple vulnerabilities which allow an attacker to bypass the equihash verifier for any block header.

Starting from 2018 cyber threat landscape shifted from Ransomware to Cryptocurrency mining attacks, attackers targeted a huge number of web portals, mechanical man devices, and different types of servers.

Cryptocurrency Mining Attack Vectors reworking the cyber threat landscape, the importance of cryptocurrencies drawing the eye of cybercriminals.

Hackers taking every and each chance for mining cryptocurrencies, even they inserted Cryptocurrency Mining Script with the embedded videos in word documents.

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