The malware of cryptocurrency mining that affected more than one million computers in China would have generated more than US $ 2,000,000 to its creators over 2 years, according to a local report on Monday.
Police in the city of Da Lian have arrested 20 suspects of a major technology firm that apparently had gained control of a large number of computers to obtain illicit proceeds from cryptocurrency mining.
Apparently, the hackers created and inserted the malware into Internet browser plug-ins that would have been supposedly designed to boost the speed of the browser, offered in ads that would reach up to 5 million viewers in China.
By clicking on the ad and installing the extensions, more than one million computers were immediately infected to collaborate with the mining of Digibyte, Decret and Siacoin, generating around 26 million tokens over the past 2 years.
Hackers would have leaned towards the mining of smaller cryptocurrencies because they would require a lower computing capacity for their mining, being a process much more "silent" and difficult to detect by the affected victims.
Also, the report indicates that the hackers developed a network of more than a hundred agents who would act as ambassadors of this illicit software by installing it in Internet cafes.
This arrest would happen only a couple of weeks after local police had arrested another group of suspects for conspiring with a computer maintenance company to hack around 100,000 Internet cafe computers to mine Siacoin, as we would have previously reported.