Europol, in coordinated action with the Ukraine police, has arrested a threat actor this week – who illegally minted $2 million worth of cryptocurrency from a million virtual servers.
The threat actor has reportedly created these virtual servers by compromising passwords from an e-commerce subsidiary, for minting cryptos. All these proceeds were then transferred to the external wallet, says the police.
A Million-Server Network for Crypto mining
Cryptocurrency mining is a resource-intensive task, sucking up large amounts of electricity and computing power to generate coins, whose values don’t often seem to justify their creation needs.
Thus, crypto-miners, especially the illegal ones, often target the resources of others to mint coins for them, called as crypto-jacking. And this is precisely what a 29-year-old man in Ukraine did to mint $2 million worth of cryptocurrency.
Arresting him this week, the Europol and the Ukrainian police said the perpetrator hacked accounts to create a million virtual servers for his cryptojacking efforts.
Europol says they first learned of the campaign in January 2023 from a cloud service provider, investigating compromised cloud accounts on their platform. Collaborating with the firm, Europol and the Ukrainian police have tracked down the criminal and have finally arrested him on January 9th.
They seized the criminal’s computer equipment, bank and SIM cards, electronic media and other evidence of illegal activity. A separate report by the Ukrainian police says the suspect has been active since 2021 when he hacked 1,500 accounts of a subsidiary of one of the world’s largest e-commerce entities.
Using these credentials, he created over a million virtual computers to mine cryptocurrencies and moved the proceedings to an external wallet valued at about $2 million.
He’ll now face criminal charges under Part 5 of Art. 361 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, which deals with unauthorized interference in the work of information, electronic communication and electronic communication networks.
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