Why ZeroAccess botnet stopped bitcoin mining
There have been several reports this week detailing how security firm Symantec took down a large portion of a bitcoin mining botnet called ZeroAccess. What few, if any, mention is that the bitcoin mining part of the botnet hasn't been functional for almost six months, because the developers deliberately killed it. The question is, why? ZeroAccess is a piece of malware that joins an infected computer to a large network of similarly compromised machines. They can then be controlled by a central administrator, commonly called a botherder, who then gets the machines to do his bidding. Most....
Related News
Facebook has successfully dismantled a major bitcoin botnet operated by a small team of cyber criminals based in Greece. The Lecpetex botnet managed to infect 250,000 computers. At its peak it compromised as many as 50,000 Facebook accounts. Lecpetex propagated through the social media platform using spam messages with malicious code inserted into zipped attachments. Each zip archive contained an embedded Java file that would download and install a litecoin miner. It would also steal cookies and gain access to the victim's friend list, using it to send out even more spam. However, mining....
To put this potential into perspective, Mirai is capable of pulling in several hundreds of thousands of bots from IoT devices. Security researchers have come across the source code for the Internet of Things botnet called Mirai. This botnet has been used to launch major DDoS attacks against various websites. Such a powerful tool could be used to shut down nearly any public website in existence today. Now that the source code has been leaked, it becomes a lot easier to render the botnet useless. Connecting millions of devices to the Internet sounds great on paper, but it creates a big....
Locky remains one of the biggest ransomware threats to this very date. Now that the Necurs botnet is back, it looks like a new version of Locky Bitcoin ransomware is available as well. A new spam campaign is underway to infect as many computers as possible. Roughly three weeks ago, the Necurs botnet suddenly went offline, leaving security researchers puzzled as to what happened to it. This reprieve was rather short-lived, however, as the botnet returned in full force a few days ago. Moreover, it is spreading an improved version of both Locky ransomware and the Dridex banking trojan. Necurs....
For many years, people assumed lInux was one of the most secure operating systems in the world. Even though the number of cyber attacks against Linux machines remains relatively small for now, several thousand machines were infected with malware, forcing them to send out spam messages. As we all know, spam messages – such as the ones sent through Mumblehard – are one of the more common causes of Bitcoin ransomware infections. Mumblehard Linux Spam Botnet is No More. It has been over a year in the making, but Estonian law enforcement and the Eset security firm managed to put an end to the....
It's the end of the week, which means it's time for another Bitcoin News in Review, where we take a look at some of the biggest stories of the week on CryptoCoins News. This week was relatively uneventful. besides the Bitcoin in the Beltway event, but there were still some interesting happenings, including a hacker mining 500 million Dogecoins, an upcoming Bitcoin documentary, an interesting altcoin, and more. Keep reading for this Bitcoin News in Review. Hacker Creates Dogecoin-Mining Botnet. Altcoins like Dogecoin are easier to mine than bitcoin, which has a much higher difficulty.....