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).

But Why Not Just Windows? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-06-21 12:19 (#27K)

Couldn't he have made far more using malware on traditional Windows PCs? Easy to infect, goes undetected for long periods, stupider users, etc.? NASes seem a pretty obscure and limited target.

I see a lot of Windows infections but haven'tnoticed any that do mining. Most still seem to be spam botnets and password stealers.
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