The Ukrainian government recently announced plans to use energy from its power plants to mine cryptocurrency. Until now, the exploitation of these infrastructures has been mainly the result of malicious acts.
Moreover, these cybercrime operations are on the increase in Europe. They mainly target supercomputers. These high-performance systems have a very large computing power. They are therefore of obvious interest to the crypto-mining.
Several security incidents have been reported on the Old Continent. This is the case in United Kingdom, in Germany and in Swiss, especially. Suspected hacking of a supercomputer in Spain are also discussed.
The first case was identified early last week. The attack hit the ARCHER supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. In Germany, five high performance computing clusters also had to be shutdown due to a security incident.
And other similar attacks have been reported by security researchers and IT infrastructure operators. Each time, the attackers had access to the systems thanks to compromised SSH identifiers.
If the details of the intrusions are not specified, a European body overseeing research on supercomputers (the European Grid Infrastructure) has gathered information. Malware samples and network compromise indicators have been released.
According to cybersecurity company Cado Security, hackers have taken advantage of compromised SSH logins to connect to supercomputers. These access codes were allegedly stolen from researchers carrying out work on these computing systems.
There are indications that the same group of hackers may have been behind these attacks. And these intrusions therefore allowed the exploitation of a vulnerability in order to install cryptocurrency mining software, in this case the Monero (XMR).
These targeted attacks are not a first, however. However, they were the work of employees and not the result of outside intrusion. In February 2018, the Russian authorities, for example, arrested engineers from the Russian Nuclear Center.
The latter hijacked a supercomputer for crypto-mining. In the same year, it was the Australian Meteorological Bureau that found a similar crime involving some of its employees.
Mining on RTX 3070. Overclocking, tuning, profitability, consumption: If you are interested in finding more…
Mining with GTX 1660, 1660 Ti, 1660 Super. Overclocking, settings, consumption, profitability, comparisons - If…
Mining with RTX 2070 and 2070 Super. Overclocking, profitability, consumption, comparison What the RTX 2070…
Mining with RTX 3060, 3060 Ti. Limitations, overclocking, settings, consumption, profitability, comparison Let's look at…
Alphacool Eisblock Aurora Acryl GPX-A (2022) with Sapphire Radeon RX 6950 XT Nitro+ Pure in…
In the ever-evolving landscape of business strategy, Bitcoin has emerged as a pivotal asset. With…
This website uses cookies.