Synology NAS Remotely Hacked To Mine $620K In DogeCoin

by
Anonymous Coward
in security on (#3PA)
story imageFrom ThreatPost via Soylent-not-a-food-trademark-infringing-site, a single criminal hacker planted trojans on Synology NAS units around the world and managed to use the little boxes to mine $620,000 worth of "DogeCoin", the cuter version of the BitCoin "virtual currency".

This, much more than the SuperMicro vulnerability, tells me I'm living in strange new times indeed. A home network-storage appliance used over the Internet to create wealth out of nothing but electricity running some decryption code. These are concepts that just didn't even exist a short time ago.

Had the hacker been just a little more conservative in resource utilization, the scheme may have gone undiscovered for much longer. The jig was up only after Synology users complained about performance to tech support! (Clearly, no one, anywhere, ever checks their router and firewall logs for unusual destinations).

I find this interesting as I had just been reading Ars Technica's new writeup of DIY NAS solutions as alternatives to the expensive fixed purpose NAS devices (some interesting alternatives mentioned in the comments there).

Nice level (Score: 2, Interesting)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-06-20 23:02 (#27D)

So, if you "borow" other people's computers for cryptocoin mining, make sure to set the processes to run at a lower priority as to not affect the system's legitimate users.

Now if you could only hide their electric bill and somehow silence the squealing little fans that come on most of those little NAS boxes...
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