Security News Monero Miner Infects Hundreds of Windows Servers

[silversurfer]

Hundreds of servers have been infected with Monero mining malware after miscreants managed to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft IIS 6.0, ESET warns.

The infection campaign has been ongoing since at least May 2017 and has resulted in the attackers creating a botnet and mining over $63,000 worth of Monero (XMR) to date. The actors behind this campaign modified a legitimate open source Monero mining software and installed it on unpatched servers.

The malicious software used in this campaign is a fork of a legitimate open source Monero CPU miner called xmrig, which was released in May 2017. The crooks simply copied the original open source codebase and made only a few changes to it when creating their mining tool.

Specifically, they only added hardcoded command line arguments of their own wallet address and mining pool URL. They also included arguments to kill all previously running instances of the software itself, an operation that couldn’t have taken the crooks more than several minutes, ESET notes.

Full Article: Monero Miner Infects Hundreds of Windows Servers | SecurityWeek.Com

 

[AlanOstaszewski]

My opinion:
This is kinda adware. A adware that changes your search engine is earning money because you see then more ads. This is the same. A mining program is using your resources and it gives the money to hackers.
Mining moneros can be good and can be abused.
Ads are being abused too. Because some sites are displaying too much ads the user is disabling them everywhere. That will happen with moneros too. If you will talk about moneros everyone will think about a botnet that is mining moneros.
This situation happened with bitcoins in my life too. Many people are thinking about darknet and drugs when they are hearing from me "bitcoin". I hear in the word "bitcoin" big potential. It allows anonymous money transactions in seconds.
I mean with this that all good things can be abused for bad things. I hope you understand me!