Interpol cooperated with Trend Micro, a cyber security company, to reduce the phenomenon of cryptographic intrusions affecting MikroTik routers in South-East Asia, according to a press release on January 8. Although this cooperation has reduced the number of affected devices by 78%, it is unlikely to have a significant impact on mining hashrate.
Cryptojacking is a malicious practice whereby attackers infect popular devices with cryptographic malware using the victim's resources to extract cryptographic currency. Cybersecurity Trend Micro cooperated with Interpol Global Complex for Innovation, based in Singapore, to clean up MikroTik routers infected with malware.
As part of "Goldfish Alpha Operation", Trend Micro developed the "Cryptojacking Mitigation and Prevention" guidelines (Mitigation and Prevention of Cryptographic Intrusion), which details how the vulnerability of the common brand of home and corporate routers has led to thousands of devices being infected across the ASEAN region. The document also suggests how victims could use Trend Micro software to detect and eliminate malware.
In the five months since the document was developed in June 2019, experts from national computer incident response teams and police helped identify and restore more than 20,000 infected routers, reducing the number of infected devices in the region by 78 percent.
The vulnerability was observed in all MikroTik routers that have their own RouterOS operating system. These routers contain a wide range of processors based on ARM technology, from single-core 600 megahertz to 72 core 1 gigahertz processors.
Trend Micro reported that the attackers extracted the Monero (XMR) from damaged devices, which is one of the only coins that can be reasonably extracted using ordinary processors - especially after the RandomX upgrade, which further shifted the focus to CPUs.
While hashlet figures vary greatly depending on the type of ARM processor, indicators offered by the Monero community allow for an average of 300 hashes per second for some popular ARM processors commonly found on smartphones.
