A 29-year-old man in Ukraine was arrested this week for using hacked accounts to create 1 million virtual servers used to mine $2 million in cryptocurrency. As announced today by Europol, the suspect is believed to be the mastermind behind a large-scale cryptojacking scheme that involves hijacking cloud computing resources for crypto-mining.
By using the computing resources of others' servers to mine cryptocurrency, the cybercriminals can profit at the expense of the compromised organizations, whose CPU and GPU performance is degraded by the mining.
For on-premise compromises, the damage extends to having to pay for increased power usage, commonly generated by miners. A 2022 report from
Sysdig estimated the damage from cryptojacking to be about $53 for every $1 worth of Monero (XMR) the cybercriminals mine on hijacked devices.
Europol says they first learned of the cryptojacking attack in January 2023 from a cloud service provider who was investigating compromised cloud accounts on their platform.
