Not terribly long ago, when people heard that computer systems had been hacked, the biggest worry was about the data that was stored on those systems. A lot has changed in the past couple years. Today, one of the most popular goals of hackers is ‘cryptojacking’ where they will get into systems and use the hardware to mine one or more crypto currencies.
This is exactly what happened to the private cloud computing systems run by Tesla. The Amazon Web Services environment was infected, allowing the hackers to use the powerful computers to mine the currency. It is not clear exactly what type of currency was being mined, or exactly how long it went on for before the hack was found, though they claim it was only a matter of hours before it was eliminated.
Tesla has confirmed that the way that the hackers got in has been fixed so that it won’t happen again, at least not in the same way. For those still worried about things like user and corporate data, Elon Musk has confirmed that the hackers only ever had access to a very limited amount of data. Data gathering was obviously not the main goal of the attack.
This is just the latest high-profile example of cryptojacking, which is almost certainly going to become one of the biggest issues large scale IT companies face in the future. Even many personal computers will be at risk. While an individual PC typically can’t mine too much very quickly, if hackers are able to infect millions of computer, it could add up very quickly.
Malwarebytes, the popular anti-virus and malware company, has said that they block about 8 million attempts at ‘drive-by-mining’ every day as of September of 2017, and that number has likely risen since then.
Whether you are running a single PC, or responsible for large scale processing, this is just one more warning to make sure your systems are protected.
