It turns out that a botnet has been attacking Microsoft SQL database servers to extract cryptocurrencies with them for two years. The information was provided to Guardicore Labs media.
In the past few weeks alone, hackers have managed to infect almost 2,000 to 3,000 servers a day. As reported by Hacker News, the botnet was named "Vollgar". It's about the name of the cryptocurrency v-dimension (vollar), which it extracts while kicking monero (XMR).
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Botnet tries to access servers with a low level of security. After taking over, it performs configuration changes, thus enabling hackers to perform any illegal activities, mainly focused on background mining of digital currencies.
According to the report, the attacks affect many sectors, including healthcare, logistics companies, IT, telecommunications and education. The countries where the attacked servers are located are: China, India, South Korea, Turkey and the United States.
The network of attacked computers was used to host the entire attacking infrastructure, and its main server is - as it turns out - located in China. At least that's what Guardicore thinks.
To help companies find out if their servers were infected with this attack, Guardicore released a special script that is available on GitHub.
Other threats
In another type of threat informed ZDNet. It turns out that QR codes - now ubiquitous, e.g. in the cryptocurrency industry as a means of facilitating payments with bitcoins and other digital currencies - have become another hacker tool.
Their new method is shockingly simple. The attack consists in the fact that hackers have made available on the network a service that allows creating a QR code for payments in cryptocurrencies. The catch, however, was that the generated codes sent funds to addresses in the BTC blockchain belonging to fraudsters. In other words, the person who used the tool properly legally sent their funds to the address of the hackers.
Harry Denley, security director at MyCrypto, discovered that the program was available on nine websites. According to his report, around $ 45,000 in Bitcoins (BTC) was stolen in this crafty way over the past month.
