Hackers see the world of crypto unfortunately still as their playground. This is further illustrated by a story recently told on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast by one Ryan Montgomery. He describes himself as a so-called ‘ethical hacker’, who has made a name for himself by looking up and exposing pedophiles online. During the podcast, Montgomery revealed that he had also hacked into tens of thousands of computers and had these machines mine crypto for him.
Zombie crypto miners
In his own words, the hacker had complete control over the computers he had penetrated, and with this he had the computers mine cryptocurrencies for him. At first mainly bitcoin (BTC) and litecoin (LTC).
“At that time it was just Bitcoin and Litecoin. I had quite a few infected computers that were always mining. The thing I did was, what you might call “nice” was that when the computer was idle, it would use 100% of the processor and graphics card to mine the coins. And when the computer was in use, it only used 20% so they don’t have a horrible experience with their computer crashing all the time.”
This way, the victims would actually have no idea that the computer was taken over by a hacker. In addition, Montgomery said he did this so as not to get in the way of the victims too much.
Tens of thousands of acquired miners
His own estimate is that he put many tens of thousands of computers to work for him in this way. All these computers were then connected to one mining pool. It is not surprising to think that he has managed to earn a nice pocket money with his actions. Whether you can call yourself an ‘ethical hacker’ if you do this kind of antics is of course also questionable.
At a certain point, Montgomery was done with it and thought it was no longer ethical to continue doing what he was doing. Then he called it quits and decided to pursue other business goals. What Montgomery is up to now is unknown.
