Monero, amongst the largest virtual currencies in the market saw some bad news late last year. It was reported that on December 15, 2017, the computers of Transneft (A Russian oil Pipeline Company) were hacked in order to mine Monero coins. Though it wasn’t elaborated on whether this hacking was the first of its kind, it has been confirmed by the industry experts that hackers have increasingly been using corporate computers in order to mine cryptocurrencies.
Igor Demin, spokesperson for Transneft said that the software for mining cryptocurrency was automatically downloaded from the web by a Transneft computer and then deleted later. However, he promised that Transneft had programs added into their systems to ensure this from happening again in the future.
“Incidents where the company’s hardware was used to manufacture cryptocurrency have been found. It could have a negative impact on the productivity of our processing capacity,” said Vladimir Rushailo, the Vice President of Transneft.
In order to prevent this from happening to other companies in the future, Russian law has proclaimed that anyone attempting to hack corporate servers will be sentenced to 6-10 years of prison. “More and more people have learnt that, in fact, they do not even need to stand up from the sofa to make money, if they are not caught,” says Pavel Lutsik,Head of information security projects with Croc IT firm.
Russia’s central bank has also said that there are risks that crypto currencies would be used for money laundering or financing terrorism and hence they are to control and supervise the virtual currency market even more.
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