Chinese authorities have arrested 20 individuals, 9 of them in custody and 11 on bail, over a cybercrime event where malware was spread to over a million computers to mine cryptocurrency, local media reported on Monday.
All of the people arrested were connected to a company called Dalian Shengping Network Technology, a software developer. The company allegedly made a plugin that would infect the computers of those who download it, mining coins and making a profit of about 15 million Chinese yuan (~$2.26 million).
Considering that a million computers were infected in total, this means that each computer has mined a total of $2 in coins. Although this may sound like a small sum, mining through CPUs is a very slow and gradual process, making it significantly unprofitable.
However, since the hackers weren’t using their own equipment and electricity to mine the cryptocurrency, it was a low-risk endeavor for them until they were caught by authorities.
Police investigators said that the cybercriminals made use of the GPU resources of their victims, meaning that the process couldn’t have gone on for long since these chips are far more efficient at mining than CPUs are.
The originator of the plugin that caused all this chaos - Yang Mobao - has already been in police custody since March 8. After the trial, Mobao confessed that he propagated a plugin called “Cool Magic Video” to infect over a million systems.
From investigations, it turns out that Mobao used to manage internet cafes in the past and was a self-taught computer programmer.
Had these individuals been able to execute their mining activities without the authorities catching wind of them, they could have split the earnings and run off with $100,000 each.
This is almost pennies on the dollar compared to another recent arrest in China involving 10 people who ran a scam that siphoned $47 million off from its victims. Considering how large some of these scams are, they appear to be a much larger threat to the Chinese public than mining malware.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
