Monero has been making headlines a lot this year regarding mining because it’s probably hackers’ favorite coin.
On the other hand, interest in Monero has been growing among crypto enthusiasts who have found it to be an excellent solution for investment.
New Monero mining technique surfaces
It’s been revealed that researchers are Trend Micro have noticed that there’s a new technique called Process Hollowing that is used for mining Monero.
This was reportedly implemented by hackers since back in November, and it was targeted at users in Kuwait, Thailand, India, Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, and Pakistan.
Cisomag.com notes that Along with Process Hollowing, this technique also drops another file that acts as a container.
It’s been reported that this dropper file is not useful on its own, and its malicious nature stays hidden unless a specific set of command-line arguments are used in order to trigger it.
Researchers explained that, “The dropper is a 64-bit binary containing a packed malicious code, and we found the executable checking the arguments passed to it and verifying it upon unpacking.”
The infection routine is divided into two stages
The online publication mentioned above noted that the infection routine is divided into two stages.
The first one involves an arithmetic operation on alphanumeric strings. It’s been revealed that this is used to decrypt the information “from the arguments including the cryptocurrency wallet address of the cybercriminals specified as part of the required arguments sent to trigger the malicious file and enable the coinmining activity.”
The second stage involves the dropper executing a child process. Read more about the process in the original article.
In terms of pricing, Monero fell on the 16th position on CMC and, at the moment of writing this article, the privacy-oriented coin is trading in the red and it’s priced at $46.10.
