[2017-07-10] An Italian bank’s server was hijacked to mine bitcoin

[tyz]

An Italian bank’s server was hijacked to mine bitcoin

During a presentation at a conference last week, British cybersecurity experts had some tales to tell of surreptitious and sometimes illegal bitcoin mining in the time before huge computing power was required to turn a profit at the activity. In January 2015 the British cybersecurity firm Darktrace was called to investigate a possible intrusion in the systems of an Italian bank. Darktrace uses artificial intelligence techniques to detect aberrations in computer systems.

https://qz.com/1024930/bitcoin-malware-an-italian-banks-server-was-hijacked-to-mine-bitcoin-says-darktrace/

[bustabitsboy]

What kind of hashrate do you think a first rate banks servers can hash out ?

[1Referee]

What kind of hashrate do you think a first rate banks servers can hash out ?

It's not that they specifically targeted that bank because it has a huge load of computing power available. It's more a random victim that has been added to the large number of computers connected to a botnet. In this case, one computer or server isn't doing much, but if you pool the computing power from thousands of computers to one single point, it actually turns out to be a profitable practice. Especially if you focus all this computing power solely to altcoins, where CPU/GPU mining is still a contributing method.

[veleten]

What kind of hashrate do you think a first rate banks servers can hash out ?

thats January 2015,even at that time the difficulty was too high for servers to mine anything substantial
even with altcoins,CPUs and server's GPUs don't have enough hashrate to make profit for the hackers,maybe a couple of hundreds of dollars at most
it was more of the parasitic load on the servers and unauthorised access to one of the top banks to be worried about