A report published yesterday by ZDNet indicates that hackers have gone in hard in their attempts to hack into internet exposed Ethereum wallets and mining equipment.

Despite the crash in the market, sending Bitcoin below $3,500, hackers are still scanning for crypto equipment with port 8545. The port 8545 is the standard port for many Ethereum wallets and devices used for mining. The port serves as the standard port for a programmatic API, JSON-RPC interface used by local services and apps to bring in cryptocurrency mining and related information.

The aforementioned API should only be exposed locally but with some wallets and equipment used for mining, they show their presence on all interface and thus, the user's security is put at quite a lot of risk. On top of this, the fact that the JSON-RPC interface doesn’t have a default configurations password and is dependents solely on user settings. In the end, this mining equipment and wallets exposed on the internet leave them right in the crosshairs for hackers to shift funds or manipulate addresses through a simple to use programming command.

Apparently, the hackers have been operating since the 3rd December this year. According to BTC Manager, the co-founder of Bad Packets LLC, Troy Mursch shared data which showed that the scanning has been almost tripled this month than November. In addition to this, Mursch said, “despite the price of cryptocurrency crashing into the gutter, free money is still free, even if it’s pennies a day.”

Even though the price of Ethereum is less than appealing at the minute, this is a good example as to why users should be careful about the security of their wallets and cryptocurrency holdings. Internet-wide scanning usually takes place when the price of cryptocurrency is towards a higher than it is at the moment however, there is a big volume of scans occurring over the past few weeks which is rather surprising after November's crypto crash.

Throughout this year, hackers don’t look like they have taken a holiday as news of a new hack or scam seems to come out in the news every week and as we close the year, this seems to be more evident despite the current market prices.

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