Research Finds That 5% Of Monero (XMR) Was Mined Through Malware

A report by the network and enterprise security company Palo Alto Networks recently found that around 5% of all the Monero (XMR) tokens in circulation was mined maliciously. We have already posted about the Monero malware scams and how it affected Apple computers worldwide.

Even though Monero claims to be different than most of the cryptocurrencies, the practice of using other users’ computers’ processing power in order to mine cryptocurrencies is known as ‘cryptojacking‘ which is an acute trend in 2018 – especially since it is done without any permission.

The report found more than 3,773 emails that were somehow connected with mining pools, about 2,995 mining pools URLs, 2,341 XRM wallets, 981 Bitcoin wallets, 131 Electroneum wallets, 44 Ethereum wallets and 28 Litecoin wallets.

According to Josh Grunzweigh of the Unit 42 market research team, Monero has an “incredible monopoly” on the cryptocurrencies which are targeted by malware – with a total of $175 million mined maliciously (about 5% of all XMR in circulation).

Meanwhile, Monero has a market cap of $2.11 billion and is trading for around $131. The report also noted that the data does not include the web-based Monero miners or other miners that they could not access – which is definitely something that must go into the calculation.

According to it, the total hash rate for Monero cryptojacking is around 19 mega-hashes per second which bring in about $30,443 a day. In an email sent to Cointelegraph, Justin Ehrenhofer of the Monero Malware Response WorkGroup wrote that people may take advantage of XMR’s privacy because Monero is “built without any explicit use cases”.

As he wrote:

“The Monero community is interested in helping victims of unwanted system mining and other nefarious actions […] We will never be able to prevent every machine from being compromised. The proportion of coins estimated to be mined with Monero speaks largely to the number of machines that are compromised. In addition to mining Monero, they could be sending spam and monitoring users. We hope that our contributions will limit unwanted behavior at the source.”

Yesterday, the police in Japan reported that they have opened an investigation into a case of Monero cryptojacking with the use of the Coinhive mining software.