5% from total Circulation monero mined from malware, Says Report

According to reports by Network and Enterprise Security Company Palo Alto Networks, attackers maliciously mined around 5 percent of all Monero (XMR) in circulation.

The research says that the mining has been done via cryptojacking. Cryptojacking is the method of using other users’ computers’ processing power to mine for cryptocurrencies without the owners’ consent.

The Palo Alto Network WildFire platform has identified around 470,000 unique cryptojacking miners. The report also finds 3,773 emails connected with mining pools, 2,995 mining pools URLs, 2,341 XRM wallets, 981 Bitcoin (BTC) wallets, 131 Electroneum (ETN) wallets, 44 Ethereum (ETH) wallets, and 28 Litecoin (LTC) wallets.

According to reports, Monero is the prime target by malware amongst cryptocurrencies, with a total of $175 mln mined maliciously (about 5 percent of all Monero now in circulation). The cryptocurrency has a total market cap of around $1.9 bln, trading for around $119 and down around 10 percent over a 24 hour period to press time.

Of the 2,341 wallets found, only 55 percent (or 1,278) have more than 0.01 XMR (currently worth around $1.19).

The report also notes that the 5 percent calculation might be too low as the data does not comprise web-based miners or other miners they could not access.

For this reason, a malware workgroup of volunteers educates crypto users on how to avoid malware and prevent cryptojacking.

“The community is interested in helping victims of unwanted system mining and other nefarious actions […] we will never be able to prevent every machine from being compromised. The proportion of coins estimated to be mined with Monero speaks largely to the number of machines that are compromised. In addition to mining it, they could be sending spam and monitoring users. We hope that our contributions will limit unwanted behavior at the source.”

Yesterday, Japanese police informed that they have released an assessment into a case of cryptojacking with the use of the Coinhive mining software. Last week, a security team found that mining malware contaminated over 40,000 computers, including those mining Monero.