Once again, news has broken that malware has been designed to secretly mine Monero on devices that download particular software. The mining trojan horse, which is known as Nitrokod, has already infected over 100,000 devices and an unknown amount of Monero.
Malware pretending to be Google Translate secretly mines Monero
Software, which has been pretended to be applications such as Google Translate (although there are many others), has been used as a trojan horse for malware which miners Monero.
It is suspected that the group behind Nitrokod is Turkish, and that the software has already been infected users in at least 11 different countries, but it is not easy to estimate for obvious reasons.
What is Nitrokod?
Nitrokod is a trojan horse that, under the guise of being a legitimate app, secretly mines Monero on one’s device. This means that those who download the application can unwittingly become part of a Monero miner’s mining set up.
Mining unintentionally uses up a lot of computing power, and this can significantly decrease a computer’s performance.
Many people will have no idea why their computers are so much slower than they used to be, or perhaps so much hotter than they used to be – the victims won’t even know that their computers are secretly mining Monero for someone else.
Over 100,000 downloads since 2019
The Google Translate app, which appears to be Nitrokod’s most popular app, has now been downloaded over 100,000 times since 2019.
Since Google Translate is first and foremost a browser tool and not typically downloadable on desktop, Nitrokod are able to find a niche in the market.
The ensure that the tool works as it should, and don’t start mining straight away. In fact, it is estimated that in a typical case users would download the application and not notice any change in performance at all.
Then, after six months or so, the malware would be activated and the computer’s performance would be put into decline.
Once six months has passed, the user is so familiar with having the app that they aren’t suspicious of it, and the miner can continue to operate for as long as the computer is turned on.
Should the team at Nitrokod choose, they may choose to only mine with a small percentage of the computer’s capacity, thereby not decreasing the performance much at all to be better protected.
Why mine Monero this way?
As the most popular coin that is private on its layer one, there are huge advantages to using Monero over other privacy tools.
When one uses Tornado Cash on Ethereum or CoinJoin on Bitcoin, it is very obvious on-chain that someone has tried to obfuscate their funds; the problem with coin mixers it that there is still a trace of where the funds came from and in many cases one can probabilistically determine whose coins are whose.
Chainalysis claimed that it was partly because of the weakness of technology like CoinJoin that they were able to track down the Bitfinex hackers, and other US authorities have claimed that they were able to determine that the North Korean hacking group Lazarus was using Tornado Cash – those who want privacy need it on a layer one.
For hacks such as this, Monero’s privacy features make it the ideal coin to mine. Since Monero is completely anonymous, only the recipient can know how much Monero they have mined this way – the extent of the operation is very difficult to detect, which allows it to go under the radar for far longer.
Unlike Bitcoin, Monero is mined using GPUs, not ASICs. This means that it is far more efficient to mine on one’s laptop, especially if one is part of a mining pool or can scale to lots of devices. Bitcoin has high hardware requirements, which means that economies of scale can inevitably come to dominate the mining industry far more easily.
What does this mean for Monero?
Regulators will be displeased by news such as this, as it isn’t the first time that this sort of thing has happened. In fact, Monero mining botnets have been a core component of Monero almost since the blockchain’s inception.
In a world replete with rising political tensions such as the war in Ukraine and the potential war in Taiwan, it is understandable that people will look for a cryptocurrency that better enshrines their individual sovereignty than Bitcoin.
CBDCs are on the horizon, with over 90% of central banks around the world having stated that they are either researching or actively developing CBDCs in the short to medium term.
It is understandable why people would access to privacy like Monero, which uses a range of advanced and cutting-edge technology and unparalleled. Monero is not highly inflationary, and
Whilst such malware may be irritating for those who have mistaken downloaded applications such as the aforementioned, or perhaps had their computer infected with a virus in another way, there are silver linings for the Monero community.
The prevalence of malware like this means that far more people are mining Monero than would be otherwise, knowingly or not, and the Monero hash rate can rise in a way that wouldn’t be possible if Monero didn’t have such strong privacy.
Higher hash rate means that the network is more secure and is less vulnerable to a 51% attack. Having lots of different computers independently mining in this way means that the network is very secure and can remain highly decentralised.
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