Several cybersecurity firms are reporting of new cryptocurrency mining viruses that are being spread using EternalBlue—the same NSA exploit that was leaked by the hacking group Shadow Brokers and responsible for the devastating widespread ransomware threat WannaCry.
Researchers from Proofpoint discovered a massive global botnet dubbed “Smominru,” a.k.a Ismo, that is using EternalBlue SMB exploit (CVE-2017-0144) to infect Windows computers to secretly mine Monero cryptocurrency, worth millions of dollars, for its master.
“Based on the hash power associated with the Monero payment address for this operation, it appeared that this botnet was likely twice the size of Adylkuzz,” the researchers said.
The botnet operators have already mined approximately 8,900 Monero, valued at up to $3.6 million, at the rate of roughly 24 Monero per day ($8,500) by stealing computing resources of millions of systems.
The highest number of Smominru infection has been observed in Russia, India, and Taiwan, the researchers said.
The command and control infrastructure of Smominru botnet is hosted on DDoS protection service SharkTech, which was notified of the abuse but the firm reportedly ignored the abuse notifications.
“As Bitcoin has become prohibitively resource-intensive to mine outside of dedicated mining farms, interest in Monero has increased dramatically. While Monero can no longer be mined effectively on desktop computers, a distributed botnet like that described here can prove quite lucrative for its operators,” the researchers concluded.
“The operators of this botnet are persistent, use all available exploits to expand their botnet, and have found multiple ways to recover after sinkhole operations. Given the significant profits available to the botnet operators and the resilience of the botnet and its infrastructure, we expect these activities to continue, along with their potential impacts on infected nodes.”
Another security firm CrowdStrike recently published a blog post, reporting another widespread cryptocurrency fileless malware, dubbed WannaMine, using EternalBlue exploit to infect computers to mine Monero cryptocurrency.
Since it does not download any application to an infected computer, WannaMine infections are harder to detect by antivirus programs.
Besides infecting systems, cybercriminals are also widely adopting cryptojacking attacks, wherein browser-based JavaScript miners utilise website visitors’ CPUs power to mine cryptocurrencies for monetisation.
Since recently observed cryptocurrency mining malware attacks have been found leveraging EternalBlue, which had already been patched by Microsoft last year, users are advised to keep their systems and software updated to avoid being a victim of such threats.
