Supercomputers Hacked for Cryptocurrency Mining

Supercomputers Hacked for Cryptocurrency Mining

Some Supercomputers across the Europe have been targeted by the Russian Hackers to mine Cryptocurrency over the past few days forcing offline key IT resources working on them. At least dozens of supercomputer are shutdown after the cyber attack tried to take control of them.

This kind of security incident have been reported in UK, Germany and Switzerland while a similar intrusion is rumored to have also happened at a high performance computing center located in Spain, According to the report .

The first report came from Edinburgh, which runs ARCHER supercomputer the organization reported the ARCHER system to navigate and reset the SSH passwords to further attacks. The bwHPC, the organization research project across supercomputer in the Germany also announced on Monday the five of its High performing cluster had to be shutdown due to the this security Incident. 

    "Once a Hacker gained access to the supercomputer node, they appear to have used an exploit     for the CVE-2019-15666 vulnerability to gain root access and then deployed an application that application be used to mine Cryptocurrency"

Attacker were logging in from there compromised network, at some of the universities in Poland, shanghai and the China Science and Technology Network. It is claimed that some of the credentials are shared between academics Institutions, making it easier for would be attackers. It is claimed that that hackers are exploiting CVE-2019-15666 for privilege escalation before deploying the cryptocurrency miner.

                                           

                                          Hackers Compromised SSH Logins to Mine Cryptocurrency

Hackers Compromised SSH Logins to Mine Cryptocurrency :

The samples of malware are released by the Computer Security Incident Response Team are being reviewed by the US based cyber Security firm. The Computer Security Response Team is a Pan European Organization that coordinate research on Supercomputer across Europe.

The Cyber-Security company said that hacker have stolen SSH credentials of the university members in China, Canada and Poland in order to gain the access of the supercomputer cluster secure shell is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network.