Monero [XMR] Mining Malware Has Reportedly Grown To Its Double Now : Report.

The range of MikroTik routers suspected of cryptojacking malware has reportedly doubled since summer 2018, reaching a quite higher number of 415K  as per a recent ‘tweet‘ published by security investigator and researcher ‘VriesHd.’

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Since August this year, VriesHd has been researching on crypto malware that targets routers and forces them to mine crypto-currencies in addition with the researchers from Bad Packets ‘Report‘.

They discovered that routers by Mikrotik, a Latvian manufacturer of network equipment’s, were compromised by a min of sixteen several kinds of malware along with Coinhive, a cryptojacking software-package mining privacy-oriented cryptocurrency Monero [XMR].

By Sep the calculable range of compromised routers surpassed 280,000, in line with Bad Packets. Within the recent tweet, VriesHd explains that he has solely checked 3 potential ways to abuse MikroTik, though there are many more ways. VriesHd’s reviews, that are barely based on preliminary projections, shows 415,000 routers affected for now.

As per an interview with tech news outlet ‘The Next Web’, As VriesHd stated that the attackers have recently switched from Coinhive to a mere another mining software package, like Omine and CoinImp. He additionally noted that the precise range could be slightly off, as the present information solely reflects the infected IP addresses. However, he believes the amount still remains high. Explaining further, VriesHd added:

“It wouldn’t surprise me if the actual range … would be somewhere around 350,000 to 400,000,”

As reported earlier also, Brazil is most affected by cryptojacking. In line with the analysis by Iran’s cybersecurity authority, Brazil was hit over by more than 81,000 times by Coinhive in the month of Oct. alone. ‘India‘ in at the second place with around 29,000 incidents, followed by Indonesia with quite more than 23,000 incidents.

In line with a report published by Bloomberg earlier, the total range of crypto mining malware cases have ‘raised‘ over 500% this year once hackers allegedly steal a code targeting Microsoft Systems from the NSA [U.S. National Security Agency].

Another report by network and enterprise security company ‘Palo Networks’ also found that around 5% of all Monero [XMR] in circulation was pre mined through cryptojacking.