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).

Great article (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-22 12:21 (#27S)

Thanks for linking to that Ars article comparing the two NAS systems. I hadn't seen it and it's a good article. I just bought and set up a FreeNAS on ixSystems hardware. It was expensive but I don't regret it - the machine has tons of RAM and high bandwidth network cards and it runs at less than 35W, which is good enough for me. I'm still figuring out all the goodness of ZFS and the different plugins but despite my learning curve, it's at its heart a solid FreeBSD system I have full, root access to, and no worries that some crazy script is mining bitcoin on my hardware.
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