Forget about data theft, hacker hijack Amazon cloud account to dig bitcoin

Money may not grow from trees, but it can grow from Amazon Web Services (AWS) .

A report from the security group RedLock found that at least two companies with AWS cloud accounts were attacked by hackers and used to dig virtual money. Hackers have access to Amazon's cloud server after realizing that the admin console is not password protected.

'In further analysis, the team found that the hacker executed the order to dig bitcoin from one of Kubernetes' containers. Kubernetes is an open source technology created by Google that makes it easy to write applications in the cloud.

The affected company is Aviva and Gemalto, both are billion-dollar and multinational companies. They were informed by RedLock about the problem.

Hackers are known to sneak into business servers to steal data and sell for money. But virtual money is another story. These hackers basically only occupy space on the enterprise archives.

Amazon, Aviva and Gmalto have yet to comment.

Power from the crowd

Although anyone can dig bitcoin, this is very power consuming. For many people, it is worth it for the very attractive benefit. To avoid the high cost of digging alone, many bitcoin diggers join a group, combine computers and computing power to solve complex algorithms.

Making money may not be as difficult as you think

Solving the problem successfully created many new bitcoin, which was worth up to $ 4,300 per bitcoin on Friday. By standard, virtual money can dig until there are a total of 21 million bitcoins on the Internet, but each year the process is getting harder and harder.

RedLock discovered hundreds of admin consoles who are not password-locked on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, most of which are not taken care of by admin.

But illegally digging bitcoin is not just from outside. CoinDesk found two IT workers working for the Crimea government were sacked in September last year when it was discovered digging bitcoin on a company computer. In January, US Fed employees were also fined for digging on US central bank servers.