South Korean Police Crackdown On Mining Malware: 6000 PC’s Hacked

By Prashant Jha

The Korean National Police Agency Cyber Bureau (KNPACB) have arrested five men for the illegal installation of mining malware on different PCs across the country.  The primary objective of this malicious mining malware is to snoop and dupe people of their digital cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple etc. The Korean government along with the police have pledged allegiance to protect their citizens against these cybercriminals.

The South Korean Police agency in its 2017 report dubbed as “Status and Measures of Hacking Damage of Virtual Currency Exchanges in the Last Three Years,” gathers crypto related unethical hacks online, to protect its citizen against any kind of theft and fraud. It has been reported that a total of 7 Crypto exchanges and around 150 digital wallets have been breached or affected by these hacker nuisances since 2016. Korean police have arrested a total of 6  cyber criminals regarding these crimes, a very low percentage given the severity of the issue.

Also Read: Can Cryptocurrency Scams Be Stopped?

An excerpt from the interview.

“The amount of money stolen by the hacking of cryptocurrency exchanges has been steadily increasing every year. The number of illegal withdrawals, which was only KRW 300 million [$265,280] in 2016, increased to KRW 40.5 billion [$35.9 million] in 2017, and two hacking cases occurred in 2018, amounting to KRW 71.3 billion [$63 million] in a theft.”   

How People become a Target:

The Korean Police in its statement to the press explained how these online frauds which spiked quite a lot between October to December. A group of 5 hackers headed by Kim Amu-gae sent out a total of 32,435 emails containing the malevolent crypto mining malware, mainly targeted at active PC users around the country.

The Police explained, these hackers used to collect job applicant’s email addresses from big corporations. These cyber criminals earthed a total of 30,000 such emails and then send them with infected emails. As soon as the applicants opened their emails, the malware gets automatically installed into their computers.

The police further said, due to its latest anti-malware software, they detected the problem at earliest and within 3-7 days the total crackdown happened. Another cyber expert explained what impact do these fraudulent cases brings to the crypto world.

“Crypto jacking significantly reduces the performance of computers and if exposed to institutions, it could have a serious effect on society. PC users must have secure anti-virus software in place and update browsers frequently. Also, if the performance of a computer suddenly drops, users will have to suspect the presence of mining malware,”

These kind of cyber attacks are a common occurrence these days. Thus it’s imperative for every country to have well structured Cyber laws to keep up with the criminals.