- Apr 25, 2013
- 5,355
Till now, he have heard about “Bitcoin digital wallet hacked” or “Bitcoin website hacked”, but now a hacker has stolen cryptocurrency from mining pools and generated $83,000 in digital cash in more than four months by gaining access to a Canadian Internet provider.
Bitcoin is a virtual currency that makes use of cryptography to create and transfer bitcoins. Users make use of digital wallets to store bitcoin addresses from which bitcoins are received or sent. Bitcoin uses public-key cryptography so that each address is associated with a pair of mathematically linked public and private keys that are held in the wallet.
Researchers at Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (CTU), a cyber intelligence company, have discovered a series of malicious activities in which a cryptocurrency thief used bogus Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) broadcasts to hijack networks belonging to no less than 19 Internet service providers, including Amazon and other hosting services like DigitalOcean and OVH, in order to steal cryptocurrency from a group of bitcoin users.
"In total, CTU researchers documented 51 compromised networks from 19 different Internet service providers (ISPs)," the Dell team wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
By broadcasting malicious network routes through BGP, the Bitcoin thief was able to redirect a portion of online traffic from legitimate currency-mining servers on one network to bogus servers on another network that masqueraded as the genuine one.
According to the team of researchers, the hacker specially targeted a collection of Bitcoin mining “pools” – bitcoin producing cooperatives in which users contribute the computing power of their systems to gain their own percentage of the resulting cryptocurrency the pool produces.
The bogus mining servers allowed miners to continue mining cryptocurrency but that spoofed servers never issued any payouts to the miners. Instead, all payouts from the overall mining activity went straight into the pockets of the attacker. In just a period of four months, the attacker generated approximately $83,000 in cryptocurrency.
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Bitcoin is a virtual currency that makes use of cryptography to create and transfer bitcoins. Users make use of digital wallets to store bitcoin addresses from which bitcoins are received or sent. Bitcoin uses public-key cryptography so that each address is associated with a pair of mathematically linked public and private keys that are held in the wallet.
Researchers at Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (CTU), a cyber intelligence company, have discovered a series of malicious activities in which a cryptocurrency thief used bogus Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) broadcasts to hijack networks belonging to no less than 19 Internet service providers, including Amazon and other hosting services like DigitalOcean and OVH, in order to steal cryptocurrency from a group of bitcoin users.
"In total, CTU researchers documented 51 compromised networks from 19 different Internet service providers (ISPs)," the Dell team wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
By broadcasting malicious network routes through BGP, the Bitcoin thief was able to redirect a portion of online traffic from legitimate currency-mining servers on one network to bogus servers on another network that masqueraded as the genuine one.
According to the team of researchers, the hacker specially targeted a collection of Bitcoin mining “pools” – bitcoin producing cooperatives in which users contribute the computing power of their systems to gain their own percentage of the resulting cryptocurrency the pool produces.
The bogus mining servers allowed miners to continue mining cryptocurrency but that spoofed servers never issued any payouts to the miners. Instead, all payouts from the overall mining activity went straight into the pockets of the attacker. In just a period of four months, the attacker generated approximately $83,000 in cryptocurrency.
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