More than half a million machines have been hijacked by a cryptocurrency miner botnet, forcing them to mine nearly 9,000 monero tokens (worth roughly $3.6 million), according to a new report.
The Smominru botnet, which infected more than 526,000 Windows servers at its peak, has been used to mine 8,900 monero tokens since it first started appearing in May 2017, according to ZDNet. The botnet is based on the Windows exploit EternalBlue, which was developed by the U.S. National Security Agency and leaked by the Shadow Brokers hacker group last year. Eternal Blue was subsequently deployed in conjunction with another NSA-developed exploit, DoublePulsar, in the WannaCry attack.
The majority of affected machines are reportedly located in Russia, India and Taiwan, though the attack spans the globe.
https://www.coindesk.com/botnet-infects-half-million-servers-mine-thousands-monero/amp/
