

Monero, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies among criminals is mined using malicious mining programs.

A study by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and King’s College London says that hackers were able to mine 4.32% of Monero out of the total amount of cryptocurrency in circulation using malware.

Researchers Sergio Pastrana and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil stated:

Overall, we estimate there are at least 2,218 active campaigns that have accumulated about 720K XMR (57M USD). Interestingly, just a single campaign (C#623) has mined more than 163K XMR (18M USD), which accounts for about 23% of the total estimated. This campaign is still active at the time of writing …

However, it remains unknown what proportion of hackers who have obtained Monero from the use of malicious mining programs

already transferred it to fiat money.

During the 12-year period from 2007 to 2018, about 4.4 million malicious programs were detected, of which about 1 million malicious miners were identified.

Monero cryptocurrency is especially popular with hackers, with 90% of tokens of this asset actually being mined.

In 2013-2014, hackers experimented with Dogecoin and Litecoin, but Monero and Bitcoin still remain the most popular assets among cybercriminals, the study says.

In another study conducted by McAfee, it was reported that last year the amount of hidden mining with the help of malware grew by more than 4,000%.