Many supercomputer clusters in Europe were attacked for mining cryptocurrency

Due to security issues, many supercomputers in Europe that are used for scientific research are currently closed, along with the data centers that are closed with these supercomputers.

Supercomputer refers to a powerful computing system built on traditional hardware, which can provide high-speed computing for scientific work and testing complex physical phenomena.

Under normal circumstances, the main purpose of hacking these supercomputers is to steal scientific research data.

However, the hackers attacking these supercomputers in Europe turned out to be used for mining cryptocurrency. Of course, the powerful supercomputer used for mining will indeed have higher revenue.

European supercomputers are located in many European countries. Most of the supercomputers affected by this hacking attack are located in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland.

Germany is one of the most affected countries, which has a supercomputer cluster, where hackers discovered security holes in their login nodes and logged indirectly to the computer. After being found attacked, the administrator quickly blocked these supercomputers, and the login node was also suspended.

Fortunately, the computational tasks already submitted by the researchers will continue to be executed but new tasks cannot be submitted, which means that the previous experimental data will be properly processed.

After an investigation by the security agency, it was discovered that the hacker discovered the vulnerability of the European supercomputing login node, and then stealing relevant credentials to log in to some supercomputing nodes and then remotely connect to the supercomputing cluster.

After logging into these supercomputer clusters, hackers immediately installed mining programs to exploit the powerful processor performance of these supercomputers to mine virtual currency Monero.

At the same time, the hacker also set the mining running time every night to avoid the discovery of abnormalities when the processor load is high, but it is not clear when it was initially infected.

Of course, it is only used for mining cryptocurrency. In fact, it should be regarded as the luckiest part of this attack. After all, although mining loses performance, it will not cause scientific data to be stolen.

Compared with ordinary hackers attacking supercomputers only for stealing high-value scientific data, the loss caused by mining is the lightest, at least scientific researchers don’t need to worry.

In addition to the attacks on supercomputers in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, supercomputers in Barcelona were similarly attacked and should be the same group of hackers.

Via: ZDNet