• It was revealed by the company that cryptocurrency mining is used to more than three quarters of the Google (NASDAQ: ) Cloud accounts recently breached.
• An investigation by the global search giant revealed that “malicious actors” also used the accounts to scan other publicly available resources on the internet.
• Google Researchers have discovered criminal activity by hackers in Russia and South Korea.

Google Cloud account hacks have been used by miners to mine cryptocurrency and other coins, according to the American tech giant.

The breach of Google’s platform security was revealed in a report Wednesday by the company’s cybersecurity team. The report entitled “Threat Horizons” provides intelligence to organizations to try to maintain a secure environment in the cloud.

“Malicious actors were seen mining cryptocurrency in compromised Cloud instances.”
The Google report said.

Google Cloud customers have the ability to use the computing power offered by the platform, including for cryptocurrency mining. Google’s cloud service offers remote data and file storage to its customers off-site.

Google disclosed that hackers were able to mine cryptocurrency from around 86% of 50 compromised Google Cloud accounts. According to the report the crypto mining software was downloaded in 22 seconds.

The report also highlights that around 10% of compromised accounts were used for scanning other resources available online to determine vulnerable systems. 8 percent of these instances were used for attacks against other targets.

To The Flipside

• Crypto assets have seen an increase in cybercrime due to the rapid growth of crypto industries, including Bitcoin.
• There are more reports of fraud, theft from cryptocurrency, human trafficking, and other criminal activity. The vulnerability of some networks was shown in cases like the Poly Network hack.

Bitcoin is one of the most resource-intensive cryptocurrencies. It has been harshly criticized. In a world moving towards decarbonization, miners continue to look for ways to reduce this problem.

“The cloud threat landscape for 2021 was much more complex than what rogue cryptocurrency miners had made out to be.”
noted the report’s writers, Bob Mechler, director of the office of the chief information security officer at Google Cloud, and Seth Rosenblatt, Google Cloud security editor.

Google researchers discovered in their notes that a phishing attack was carried out by APT28/Fancy bear late September. Experts confirmed that Google was able successfully block the attack.

Google’s investigation also managed to identify a group of hackers supported by the North Korean regime. According to the researchers, they posed as Samsung (KS-) technicians and infected files and computers with malicious software.

Why you should care

• Cyberattacks, as well as the hacking of Google’s cloud accounts show how criminal cryptocurrency miners can make huge profits mining Bitcoin and other crypto currencies.

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