Purpleurchin cryptocurrency miners spotted scouring free GitHub, Heroku accounts
A stealthy cryptocurrency mining operation has been spotted using thousands of free accounts on GitHub, Heroku and other DevOps outfits to craft digital tokens. GitHub, for one, forbids the mining of coins using its cloud resources.
Sysdig estimated each of those 30 free GitHub accounts cost the Microsoft-owned giant $15 per month, and the free tier accounts from Heroku, Buddy and others cost providers between $7 and $10 per month."At these rates, it would cost a provider more than $100,000 for a threat actor to mine one Monero ," Sysdig researcher Crystal MorinThe service providers, of course, aren't simply going to eat the unnecessary costs.
"We can say with a medium amount of confidence that the actor has been experimenting with different coins," Morin added. So it's possible that the criminals see this as a"low-risk, low-reward test" before they move on to Monero or Bitcoin, which are higher value but also more closely monitored by law enforcement.
Additionally, each GitHub repository is created and used within one or two days."We also witnessed some of the repositories that were spawning Actions disappear," Morin said."This could be either GitHub taking down the nefarious accounts, or the actor deleting accounts as they hit the free-tier account limits."
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Purpleurchin: Cryptocurrency miners scour GitHub, HerokuPurpleurchin cryptocurrency miners spotted scouring free GitHub, Heroku accounts
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