Israeli cybersecurity company Mitiga has recommended that users of certain applications within Amazon Web Services check their systems for hidden Monero cryptocurrency miners.
Clients of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 cloud computing service using community-prepared Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are at risk, analysts say. If such a machine contains a hidden miner, it can consume all the computing resources leased by the client from Amazon. At the same time, attackers take advantage of the private cryptocurrency Monero to hide their traces, as in most other hidden mining scenarios.
Mitiga was evaluating the AWS infrastructure of a client financial institution when they stumbled upon a hidden miner. It was installed on a virtual machine running Microsoft Windows - Server 2008. According to analysts, the hackers published an infected image of the machine on AWS in order to carry out financial fraud: the client pays the bills, while the leased facilities are used to extract cryptocurrency to enrich them.
"Installing community-generated code in a business-critical infrastructure carries significant risks," the company said. "This is yet another example of risk in today's cloud marketplaces offering solutions that are easy to use, yet capable of containing malicious code or executable files, often from unknown sources."
Bitstamp cryptocurrency exchange will move customer accounts from UK to Luxembourg
Bitstamp leaves London after eight years.
“To comply with regulatory requirements and improve our own operational efficiency, we are transferring customer accounts from Bitstamp Limited to Bitstamp Europe SA, our division in Luxembourg,” the company said.
The exchange notes that this decision will not affect customer service, nor do they have to do anything extra. The completion of the account migration process will be announced separately.
In the future, they will be subject to the service and privacy policies of the Luxembourg branch.
Ethereum miners have opposed a 75% block reward reduction.
Ethereum developers have proposed to reduce the block mining reward by 75%. The initiative met with criticism from miners.
ConsenSys Managing Director John Lilik posted the EIP-2878 proposal. The update is aimed at reducing ETH inflation and maintaining purchasing power. The block reward on the Ethereum network decreased twice: from 5 to 3 ETH (-40%) and from 3 to 2 ETH (-33%). If a new proposal is introduced, it will drop to 0.5 ETH.
PegaSys Product Manager Tim Beiko believes such a radical innovation could jeopardize network security. In particular, he sees an increased risk of 51% attacks.
Bit Capital Group CEO Jimmy Thommes noted that developers should not try to equalize Ethereum's inflation with Bitcoin, since the BTC network is much older and performs different functions.
“It's a shame when we are treated as a necessary evil, reducing payouts to the lowest possible level so that we can keep working long enough to upgrade to version 2.0,” he said. Another user is confident that any decrease in the block reward will force the miners using video cards to leave the network. This will put Ethereum under the full control of the ASIC, he said.
Recall that at the end of July, the income of ETH miners increased by 60% per month, while the price of the cryptocurrency grew by 40%. The increase in income comes against the backdrop of a sharp increase in the size of online commissions.
