Cybersecurity company Trend Micro said that they’ve just detected a web address that’s spreading a botnet featuring a Monero (XMR) mining component alongside a backdoor.
This malware was addressed on Trend Micro’s official blog yesterday, June 13.
Outlaw Hacking Group is behind the malware
The company said that this malware comes from Outlaw Hacking Group, and they know this for a fact because the techniques that are employed are almost the same ones that they have used in previous operations.
Cointelegraph notes that “the software in question also holds Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) capabilities, allowing the cybercriminals to monetize their botnet through cryptocurrency mining and by offering DDoS-for-hire services.”
According to Trend Micro, the creators of this malware are still in the testing phase with it, and it’s still developing.
The reason for which they believe this is that it included some scripts that were present there but were not executed.
It also seems that the telemetry of the firm has detected infection attempts in China.
Monero in the news
Other than this, Monero was recently in the spotlight after a debate was triggered in the crypto space.
Not too long ago, Reuters released a report in which they were debating whether XMR can be a viable alternative to Bitcoin (BTC). But the report was focused mostly on the illegal activities which involve Monero.
The Monero Outreach community did not believe that the info was accurate enough and it definitely presented the privacy-oriented coin is really bad light.
They decided to come up with a response via a blog post of their own.
The blog post was titled A Response to Reuters, and it was published on 20th May.
“[…] the story that ‘examines the features and characteristics of some of the alternatives to bitcoin […]’ it arguably overemphasized the criminal use of Monero and under presented the features and characteristics that make Monero great and popular.”
