Hacking cryptocurrencies has become the new trend amongst the hacking elite. The latest hackers have joined hands with computing maintenance firms in China to hack into computers in internet cafes to mine cryptocurrency.

The police have caught the 16 suspected hackers from Rui’An city in Zhejiang province. They have gained 5 million yuan ($800,000) by hacking 100,000 computers placed at internet cafes across 30 different Chinese cities. These series of hacks have taken place since July, last year.

This time it was not Monero coins that were mined but instead Siacoin.

Sia is a decentralized storage platform secured by Blockchain technology. The Sia Storage Platform leverages underutilized hard drive capacity around the world to create a data storage marketplace that is reliable and lower in cost than cloud storage providers.

Siacoin was mined using a malware which was marketed through the computer maintenance firms. The computer maintenance firm injected the malware to the computers in the internet café with no one’s knowledge.

The hacks keep getting smarter and more notorious!

According to reports, the chief mastermind is thought to be by the network technician of an internet café software company, Jinhua. He is believed to have created the mining program.

The computers in the internet cafes started becoming slow, at usages rates at 70% which led the internet café owners to believe something uncertain was happening.

The computers got slow, but the electricity bill started hitting the roof which led the owners of the internet cafés to report the case to the local police.

“So many computers collectively poisoned, and every month electricity bills go up. This business simply can’t be done,” one internet cafe owner said.

Most of the internet cafes in Rui’An used the same unnamed computer maintenance firm which was hard hitting evidence that the maintenance firm was involved.

The reports of this cybercrime is a unique type of crypto jacking scheme and is said to be the main reason for the hike in Siacoin last year. The crypto jacking style implemented in this case was very aggressive and did not care much about being caught, while the only motto was to mine as many Siacoins as possible!

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