Hackers who break into Amazon cloud services choose to mine Bitcoin

Hackers have breached two companies’ Amazon cloud services to mine bitcoin, according to a recent report from security intelligence group RedLock.

Amazon cloud services are being used for Bitcoin mining

In a recent article, Business Insider reported that hackers were able to break into the Amazon AWS infrastructure of two companies to mine Bitcoin. According to a report by security firm RedLock, the two affected companies are Aviva and Gemalto. The security firm was surprised by the attack because the hackers were not targeting the sensitive data of the two companies. The hackers were only interested in accessing their Amazon cloud services to mine cryptocurrencies by executing a Bitcoin mining command.

The report also states:

“After further analysis, our team discovered that the hacker was executing a Bitcoin mining command from one of the Kubernetes boxes. This has turned into a parasitic bot that is performing illegal activities on the Internet.

When we think of hackers, we usually think of them attacking digital enterprise infrastructure to steal sensitive data such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, emails, passwords, etc.

Cryptocurrency mining boom

In the past few years, cryptocurrency mining has become a very competitive industry. After experiencing a "big explosion" in market value in 2017, the total market value of cryptocurrencies has reached a record high of $176 billion, and more and more companies are starting to mine cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the most attractive, with their prices hitting historical records of $5,031 and $400 respectively this year.

Since last year, Bitcoin mining difficulty has increased by about 10 million Th/s, while Ethereum's hashrate has reached 100,000 GH/s. However, Ethereum's high hashrate may not last long, as the Ethereum development team is planning to transition the Ethereum protocol from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), which will make it impossible for miners to mine Ethereum. Experts and analysts expect that current Ethereum miners will switch their hashrate to other profitable cryptocurrencies.