Security News > 2020 > May > Crypto-Mining Campaign Hits European Supercomputers
Several supercomputers across Europe were taken offline last week after being targeted in what appears to be a crypto-mining campaign.
While CSCS' notice says that the background of the attack is currently unclear, the European Grid Infrastructure security team issued an alert claiming that the purpose of the attack is cryptocurrency mining.
As part of the assaults, compromised hosts are being used as Monero mining hosts, as XMR-proxy and SOCKS-proxy hosts, and as tunnel hosts, EGI's team explains.
The attacks targeted multiple victims in Germany, including the Jülich Supercomputing Centre-maintained JURECA, JUDAC, and JUWELS, the HPC systems at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, the Taurus supercomputer at the Technical University in Dresden, and five HPC clusters coordinated by bwHPC, among others.
The attacks appear to be financially motivated, although nation-states were initially suspected of targeting the supercomputers, for espionage on COVID-19 research.