A series of attacks by some scammers have compromised the security of various supercomputers located in Europe to implement cryptocurrency miners. These incidents have been reported not only in the United Kingdom but also in Germany and Switzerland with a probable attack also in Spain.
One of the organizations reporting the attack was Germany's bwHPC which announced that five of its supercomputers had to be shut down due to a cryptominer infection.
Another system that got infected early last week is the University of Edinburgh's ARCHER supercomputer.
"Due to an exploitation of security on ARCHER's access nodes, a decision has been made to disable access to ARCHER while further investigations are ongoing." reads the status page for the system.
“As you may know, the ARCHER incident is part of a much larger problem involving many other sites in the UK and internationally. We are continuing to work with the National Cyber ??Security Center (NCSC) and Cray / HPE and further diagnostic scans are underway on the system. "
The organization reset SSH passwords in response to the incident.
The first attack in Spain, on the other hand, took place on Wednesday in Barcelona as reported by German cyber security researcher Felix von Leitner. The Swiss Computing Science Center (CSCS) in Zurich, Switzerland, also reported on a cyber incident that had to shut down all external access to its infrastructure in response to the security breach.
ZDNet, citing the opinion of a security researcher, speculates that threat actors exploited the CVE-2019-15666 vulnerability to gain root access to supercomputers and then deploy a cryptocurrency miner for Monero (XMR).
?? Small curiosity: supercomputers are processing systems that allow you to perform a series of high-performance operations since they have high processing capabilities.
