

Up to 800 devices daily are being infected.īut Benes said the figures are likely much higher as his data only accounts for devices with Avast Antivirus installed.

He estimates that 220,000 users have been infected worldwide, with Brazil, India, the U.S., and the Philippines identified as Crackonosh hotspots. The pool sites showed payments of 9000 XMR in total, that is with today prices over $2,000,000 USD.”Īvast researcher Daniel Benes warned that infected users might experience a noticeable slow down in computer performance or even higher than normal electricity bills. “The main target of Crackonosh was the installation of the coinminer XMRig, from all the wallets we found, there was one where we were able to find statistics. So far, it has netted hackers 9,000 XMR, which is valued at just under $2 million at the current price. Following installation, Crackonosh secretly uses the computer’s processing power to mine Monero for the hackers. Users expose themselves by visiting torrent sites to download and install the games.

Crackonosh nets hackers $2 million in MoneroĪccording to AA, the Crackonosh malware is hidden in torrent files of popular games, including NBA 2K19, Grand Theft Auto V, Far Cry 5, and The Sims 4. With piracy on the rise in 2021, this is an issue that will only gather steam going forward. One report claims Monero mining malware is responsible for more than 4% of XMR in circulation. Monero is said to be the top choice for cybercriminals looking to hijack computing resources to mine cryptocurrencies. It searches for and disables many popular antivirus programs as part of its anti-detection and anti-forensics tactics. Avast Antivirus (AA) has turned up a newly discovered Monero mining malware, which they call “Crackonosh.”Ĭrackonosh is distributed as a trojan with cracked software.
