Android Devices Targeted by New Monero-Mining Botnet

[LASER_oneXM]

A new botnet appeared over the weekend, and it's targeting Android devices by scanning for open debug ports so it can infect victims with malware that mines the Monero cryptocurrency.

The botnet came to life on Saturday, February 3, and is targeting port 5555, which on devices running the Android OS is the port used by the operating system's native Android Debug Bridge (ADB), a debugging interface that grants access to some of the operating system's most sensitive features.

Only devices running the Android OS have been infected until now, such as smartphones, smart TVs, and TV top boxes, according to security researchers from Qihoo 360's Network Security Research Lab [Netlab] division, the ones who discovered the botnet, which the named ADB.miner.

Botnet appears to have infected around 7,400 devices

The botnet has been extremely aggressive and has grown each day, exhibiting a worm-like behavior, with infected devices scanning the Internet for other victims.

"The number of scan [sources] has doubled every 12 [hours]," said Yiming Gong, Director of the Network Security Research Lab at Qihoo 360. "We will see how big this botnet gets."

Currently, Netlab has detected ADB.miner scans coming from nearly 7,400 unique IP addresses, based on public data collected by Netlab's Scanmon system.