Hacking things to turn them into mining machines seems to be a profitable trend these days on the internet. One hacker had the smart idea to use a NAS vulnerability to create himself a huge mining network generating a pretty impressive $620,000 of crypto-currencies while the vulnerability lasted. The hacker used a vulnerability in Synology’s DiskStation Manager that permitted unauthorised remote reading and writing on NAS devices as well as the ability to utilise then system resources of Synology NAS devices for mining. Synology has long since patched the vulnerabilities which led to the problem but not without a fair amount of customer dissatisifcation from users reporting that their NAS devices were sluggish and unusable.
The hacker used a modified version of CPUMiner to mine vast amounts of Dogecoin to his wallet address “D9cDqmVjYXdeDjMtXSV7Z3LgiHvRZ12bPX”. Analysis of the address on the blockchain shows that he amassed over 400 million Dogecoin, the bulk of which were earned in January and February of this year when prices were fairly high (much higher than they are today). The hacker inserted the mining files into a folder called “PWNED” on each of the NAS boxes. Synology NAS owners have nothing to worry about so long as they remain updated with the latest version of the Synology NAS OS “DiskStation Manager”.
Source: Security Focus, Via: Softpedia
Image courtesy of Softpedia
To make that much CPU mining he must have owned every Synology box ever created.