Security News > 2022 > September > Cryptominers hijack $53 worth of system resources to earn $1
Security researchers estimate that the financial impact of cryptominers infecting cloud servers costs victims about $53 for every $1 worth of cryptocurrency threat actors mine on hijacked devices.
The threat actors load modified OS images containing XMRig, a miner for Monero, which is a privacy-oriented hard-to-trace cryptocurrency, and currently the most profitable CPU-based mining.
The mining programs use the hacked device's CPUs, so the threat actor generates income by hijacking hardware.
Rogue crypto mining is a lower-risk activity for the attacker, much less likely to attract law enforcement attention.
"Better provisioned instances will mine the coin faster, but the cost per hour scales roughly linearly with the amount of vCPUs," details Sysdig in the report.
The figures presented in Sysdig's report underline the significance of defending against crypto mining threats by keeping cloud instances up to date and ensuring their configuration is secure.