Avast released a report in which it claims that a Monero-mining malware, named “Crackonosh,” had been discovered in over 222,000 computers that illegally downloaded torrented versions of some of the biggest video games in recent years, such as NBA 2K19 and GTA V.
The virus is in circulation since June 2018, at least, and originated in Czechia. It operates by installing crypto-mining software. It is believed that this has given its authors more than $2 million worth of Monero (XMR).
Monero is a privacy coin that is rather popular with cybercriminals since it is much harder to trace it compared to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
These types of attacks are pretty common: torrent website The Pirate Bay declared in 2018 that it would be “cryptojacking” visitors’ processing power to mine for Monero, while just a year ago, it was discovered that a botnet named “Vollgar” was targeting Microsoft’s SQL servers, also in order to mine Monero.
Avast believes that Crackonosh could work so well for so many years thanks to its built-in mechanisms that disable security software and updates so that it became very difficult to detect the program and remove it.
“The key take-away from this is that you really can’t get something for nothing and when you try to steal software, odds are someone is trying to steal from you,” commented Daniel Benes, the author of the blog post in which the reveal was made.
Source: CoinDesk.com