Hackers are targeting Spider-Man movie torrent downloads to install Monero-mining malware on the users’ computers as we can see more in today’s Monero news.
It appears that the hackers are looking for new ways to exploit non-suspecting victims and to take advantage of their computing power but this time, the main tool to use is the leaks of the new Spider-Man No Way Home movie. The hackers are targeting users that download torrents of the new Spider-man movie and for the short time being, it already become the third most successful movie of the year as per the box office statistics. The data from Box Office Mojo shows that the top-grossing movie in 2021 that raked in over $350 million during a premier week alone is Spider-Man. A movie so popular often creates off-the-books demand for leaked releases on the internet and often in form of torrent downloads. The new researchers show that it’s these releases that were targeted by hackers the most.
The study concluded that the hackers were placing Monero miners in the torrent downloads of the new movies. For the unaware, the malware is a coding element that Is not a part of the intent of the publisher and it is designed to exercise various processes in the background without the users’ consent or knowledge. In this case, the miners add exclusions for Windows Defender and spawn a watchdog process to maintain the activity and create persistence. The malware tries to stay away from the prying eyes by using “legitimate” names for files and processes that it creates like claiming to be a Google file for example. Monero on the other hand has been the crypto of choice for hackers because of the enhanced privacy features that it offers.
XMR is the coin that back-hats prefer when it comes to ransomware demands and as the reports show, someone demanded $100 million in XMR from computer giant Acer after installing ransomware on the systems.
As recently reported, The new Monero malware installs a monero crypto-miner which is quite aggressive compared to other variants. In most cases you would need to update your antivirus software otherwise this miner could enter your network and eat it up. In a new report released today by Sophos, that boasts over 500,000 businesses as customers, a new variant of the Tor2Mine crypto-miner infects company networks to mine XMR as the most popular privacy coin for being hard to trace. Sophos threat researcher Sean Gallagher said that all of the miners that they studied were Monero miners.
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