$83,000 in Bitcoins stolen from hacker hijacking traffic.

[MannDude]

Unsure how many of you follow WHIR, but it's got some good articles posts from time to time. I just saw this (http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/hacker-steals-83k-bitcoins-hijacking-traffic-directed-large-hosting-companies) on Twitter, and thought it was an interesting read.

I won't copy/paste the entire article,  but the jist of it is:

“Several users in this forum and other cryptocurrency forums noticed similar activity — mining systems mysteriously redirected to an unknown IP address that answered with the Stratum protocol,” the researchers said. “Once connected to this IP address, miners continued to receive work but no longer received block rewards for their mining efforts. Hijackers harnessed miners’ hashing power by redirecting legitimate mining traffic destined for well-known pools to a malicious server masquerading as the legitimate pool.”

Researchers believe the attacks went unnoticed since the hijacker only redirected traffic in small bursts.

A report by InformationWeek’s DarkReading said that it was believed that the hacker would have needed administrative rights to hijack BGP routes and redirect the mining, so it was likely a former employee of an ISP. The researchers traced the malicious BGP announcements to a single router at a Canadian ISP, the report said.

What do you think?

 

[Hxxx]

epic

 

[Kayaba Akihiko]

Saw this nearly a week ago on THN, pretty sad for the miners.

 

[Chuck]

Probably the government(s) don't care. The government(s) hate it. It's up to the miners to find the hacker.

 

[iClickAndHost]

Probably miners did not suffer a lot, as the article says "he did it only form small periods of time". 

But from the quantity of the traffic the hacker benefited.