Bitcoin Miners Attack Google Cloud Accounts

Google's Cloud accounts were the most recent to get targeted in a mining hack. Bitcoin mining is not as cheap as it used to be. With the rising difficulty level, increased hardware demands, and electricity requirements, many are finding it hard to justify mining the coin. 

Even with the latest launch of the Bitmain mining product due soon, the electricity requirements do not make mining lucrative in most major cities. This has caused many miners to look for cheaper options. Some have moved their mining operations to areas of the world with less expensive electricity costs, some have looked into renewable energies, and some have taken a more unethical approach.

In recent years there has been a string of malicious users looking to utilize other people’s resources to mine. Using malware and fake mobile games, some hackers have found a way to use the background resources of unsuspecting device owners.

The user typically only finds out when their device continues to run hotter than normal, or they have internet issues. There have even been a few websites that ran cryptocurrency miners in the background as you browse their website. If the user figures out what is happening, it's usually too late and the mined coins are sent directly to the hacker's wallets.

Recently, this type of resource theft came at a much bigger scale when Google reported multiple account breaches into Google Cloud accounts. Google Cloud is a service that allows users to purchase computing power, data management, and file storage. This service is typically geared toward business owners but there are some who use it for mining cryptocurrency.

Google has recently announced breaches to over 50 Google Cloud accounts. Around 86% of the accounts that were hacked were done so by cryptocurrency miners. Within 22 seconds of the breach, cryptocurrency mining software was installed and launched.

Google has not reported how long these miners were active before they were stopped, but they have reported that other malicious activities were also present in the breaches.

It is still unsure how these hackers managed to breach these accounts when Google has a task force used to discover hacking and phishing attempts on its services. As the breached accounts all followed a similar pattern, it is likely that a large hacking group is behind the attack. 

The amount of time these miners were active was probably not enough to create any decent profit. There's no doubt these hackers will try again until they are successful.

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Written by Tudor

Works as a developer and helps keeps the digital cogs turning. Leave them alone, they're busy.

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