Just a week ago reports were in that the Supercomputer named Archer from Europe was cyber-attacked by hackers to steal critical information about the research and development taken up by Universities and Government to find a vaccine for COVID 19.
Now the news is out that almost all the supercomputers operating in Germany, UK, Switzerland, and Spain were affected by a malware strain propelling mining of cryptocurrency.
According to ZDNet, the breaches took place at different time frames in this year and were infected by a specific malware strain designed to use the computing power of a supercomputer to mine Monero XMR Cryptocurrency.
Chris Domain, the Co-Founder of ‘Cado Security’ was the person who discovered and passed on the details to technology news resource ZDNet which now states that many of the powerful machines were forced to shut down as they have already leaked a section of information related to research carried out to find medicine for Corona Virus
Evidence is out that the hackers gained access to the hyperspace machine through the SSH credentials stolen from the researching individuals hailing from Poland, China, and Canada who had admin-level privileges to the extra powerful data processing machines.
ZDNet claims that the initial objective of the cyber crooks was to just mine cryptocurrency. But as soon as they learned about the digital research being carried out on super-machines, they started to use their already loaded malware capabilities to conduct spying.
Note- In the year 2018, ZDNet was the first resource to report about an ‘Insider Threat’ working for the Russian Nuclear Center who was using malware to mine digital currency from the supercomputer.
