Monero Leaks

[paxmao]

I came across this news regarding a staggering 5% of Monero being actually mined wrongfully by malicious nodes.

I can´t evaluate by myself the accuracy of the findings of the study that states that "malicious miners hijacking what amounts to an eye-popping 5% of XMR in circulation"  but looks quite worrying for privacy oriented coins. How can you actually check that Monero is being produced honestly? And for that matter, others like electroneun, verge,...

[suchmoon]

I came across this news regarding a staggering 5% of Monero being actually mined wrongfully by malicious nodes.

I can´t evaluate by myself the accuracy of the findings of the study that states that "malicious miners hijacking what amounts to an eye-popping 5% of XMR in circulation"  but looks quite worrying for privacy oriented coins. How can you actually check that Monero is being produced honestly? And for that matter, others like electroneun, verge,...

The article is annoyingly lacking details. What does it mean - malicious mining? Botnets? Many coins are targeted by botnets, but CPU-mineable ones obviously are more at risk. I'm surprised it's not 50%.

[mamichula]

The article took to long in explaining what the problem was. It makes it sound as though a group came in and stol 5% of all Monero willy nilly, but it sounds that they're just talking about Malware. Which can happen with most other coins.

[ABCbits]

Bitcoin.com never give detailed/accurate news
But, most likely they meant 5% of XMR hashrate came from hijacked device or 5% of XMR coin supply was mined with hijacked device.

Also, verify total coins mined from private/fungible cryptocurrency such as Monero isn't difficult since they don't hide the amount of mined coins in their coinbase transaction.
But coins such as Verge isn't really private since every transaction is transparent just like Bitcoin.

[paxmao]

Bitcoin.com never give detailed/accurate news
But, most likely they meant 5% of XMR hashrate came from hijacked device or 5% of XMR coin supply was mined with hijacked device.

Also, verify total coins mined from private/fungible cryptocurrency such as Monero isn't difficult since they don't hide the amount of mined coins in their coinbase transaction.
But coins such as Verge isn't really private since every transaction is transparent just like Bitcoin.

Oh, thank you! That must be why they link all this to Coinhive and the like.

[mgoz]

This is original report:
https://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2018/06/unit42-rise-cryptocurrency-miners/

I've seen a decent amount of popular sites infected with JS crypto malware, primarily through their ad servers, that mines when visiting the site. Pretty obvious when your fans start going crazy and CPU load is 100%. As long as scammers are paying customers, Google doesn't seem to care about serving malware and phishing sites through ads. Just last week, if you searched for eBay, a scammer had an ad at the top of results with fake virus alerts and crypto mining when visiting. Obviously scammers are making more money than what it costs to run the campaigns if they continue to do it.