‘Fair’ mining and privacy altcoin, Monero (XMR), shed $175 million as a result of malicious miners hijacking what amounts to an eye-popping 5% of XMR in circulation. The findings come by way of a cyber security researcher in Northern California, investigating a noticeable trend uptick in mining thievery generally.
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5% of Circulating Monero Snatched by Malicious Mining
In preparation for the company newsletter, Unit 42, Palo Alto Networks researcher Josh Grunzweig blogged, The Rise of the Cryptocurrency Miners. It’s his effort to document a growing trend over the last year, malicious mining. Mr. Grunzweig’s frequent investigations on the subject caused him to dive deeper into the particulars. He came away with two critical findings: 1, malicious mining has indeed grown, and in direct relation to the giant price spikes of 2017; 2, Satoshi Pulse ranked 14th most valuable coin by market capitalization, Monero, has lost over $175 million, 5% of its present circulation, to malicious mining activity.
Breakdown of cryptocurrencies targeted by malicious miners. Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks is a publicly traded (NYSE: PANW) cyber security company, focusing mostly on proprietary firewall solutions. It boasts almost $2 billion in revenue last year, with a global service reach of 50,000 customers in 150 countries, employing more than 5,000 people around the world.
Mr. Grunzweig “extracted a total of 2,341 Monero wallets from the analyzed sample set,” he explained in the post. “Unlike some other cryptocurrencies, it is impossible to query the Monero blockchain to extract a single wallet’s current balance without the owner’s password. This is by design: a result of how Monero was originally designed. As such, I needed to take a
