EthOS miners hacked

Ethereum cryptocurrency mining can be done with special mining farms that work under a dedicated operating system called ethOS. Quite a reasonable choice, as a system intended for ETH mining in the first place will, with high probability, mine ETH better than your regular PC operating under Windows.

Hackers seem to be aware of this fact as well, and that’s why ethOS mining stations became a priority target for at least some criminal groups. As Bogdan Botezatu, a security expert in Bitdefender, tells, their special baits for hackers based on the SSH technology have found a peculiar kind of virus designed specifically for illicit mining via ethOS computers. The virus infects the software environment and changes the wallet address to the one hackers control. Bogdan Botezatu has traced this address and tells there were 10 transactions over the past days equal to $611 in Ether.

The weakness that makes the virus able to do its job is the default login data. This makes it similar to the hacking of WiFi routers, the lazy owners of which often do not change logins and passwords.