"Hacker Spins up 1 million Virtual Servers to Illegally Mine Crypto"

Europol has recently announced that a 29-year-old man in Ukraine was arrested for using hacked accounts to create 1 million virtual servers used to mine $2 million in cryptocurrency.  The suspect is believed to be the mastermind behind a large-scale cryptojacking scheme that involves hijacking cloud computing resources for cryptomining.  Europol noted that by using the computing resources of others' servers to mine cryptocurrency, cybercriminals can profit at the expense of the compromised organizations, whose CPU and GPU performance is degraded by the mining.  For on-premise compromises, the damage extends to having to pay for increased power usage, commonly generated by miners.  Europol says they first learned of the cryptojacking attack in January 2023 from a cloud service provider who was investigating compromised cloud accounts on their platform.  Europol, the Ukrainian police, and the cloud provider worked together to develop operation intelligence that could be used to track down and identify the hacker.  The Ukrainian police say they arrested the hacker on January 9th, when they seized computer equipment, bank and SIM cards, electronic media, and other evidence of illegal activity.  The arrested individual now faces criminal charges under Part 5 of Art. 361 (unauthorized interference in the work of information, electronic communication, electronic communication networks) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.

BleepingComputer reports: "Hacker Spins up 1 million Virtual Servers to Illegally Mine Crypto"