Monero Hack Group ‘Outlaw’ Starts Targeting American Businesses

The Monero hack group ‘Outlaw’ that specializes in hijacking the computer power of the victims to mine for coins, has returned with new tools to attack businesses that are based in the United States but also Europe, as we are about to read more in the Monero news today.

The Japanese cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, reported that the Monero hack group has started infiltrating Linux-based enterprise systems that are capable of hijacking computer power and mine for the privacy coin Monero which is a process known as cryptojacking. The company said that Outlaw used a combination of the pre-existing tools and new technology to monitor programs that could detect malware. With the improved malware, you can also become able to kill the existing mining bots even the previous miners in the group’s infected systems which takes out the competition and improved mining profits.

Trend Micro said that the hack group’s activity started increasing at the end of 2019 after a few months of inactivity:

“[W]e expect the group to be more active in the coming months as we observed changes on the versions we acquired.’’

Although Outlaw confined itself only to computer systems in China, Trend Micro’s report found that it was targeting businesses in the United States. The company found that the group targeted a few honeypots- a machismo that is designed to lure the hackers to attack it which was situated across the Eastern European region. The report didn’t explain where the names of the businesses that were affected by the malware.

The Monero hack group also tried to steal information and to sell it to the highest bidder and the companies in the auto industry have not updated their internet security systems so they are now at high risk. Outlaw first came to light in 2018 after installing crypto-mining bots in the software of the Internet of Things devices. In 2019, Trend Micro announced that the group is attacking computer systems in China with a similar malware design that could hijack computer power to mine monero.

Malware that is able to hijack the computer’s power to mine monero is not something new. In 2018, more than half a million computers were infected with a botnet that was able to mine 9,000 XMR tokens over nine months. Being a privacy coin, hackers can sell Monero without the risk of detection from the authorities.