51–60 of 87 posts
I feel bad about this because I wrote an article[0] about how to hide Monero miners on Linux systems. Sometimes I ask myself if I should unpublish it as probably some of the criminals doing this type of attacks found it helpful. [0] https://alfon.xyz/posts/hiding-cryptominers-linux
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I do not think it's possible to mine using RandomX and a browser. From docs: > Web mining is infeasible due to the large memory requirement and the lack of directed rounding support for floating point operations in both Javascript and WebAssembly. So you can do whatever you want, but you will end with nothing.
So? implement soft float and round any way you please. Slow? Sure. But don’t say “infeasible”.
Title is somehow misleading. This is not about uncovering Monero users in the wild and exposing them which are criminals, as I first believed when reading the title. This is about detecting unwanted Monero miner on your system. But if you're already pwned that an unwanted process is already running on your system, a Monero miner is the least of your worries.
"We want to detect traces of RandomX (the CPU-intensive mining function for Monero) running on a cluster. "
This isn't for "Has someone rooted my laptop and started mining Monero on it", this is for "Have any of the nodes in my cluster (of potentially thousands of machines) been rooted and had Monero miners dropped on them." Your comment about being pwned totally applies to your container orchestration or hypervisor though...
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Yep. Monero is explicitly designed to remain CPU mineable, so that theoretically it remains more decentralized and mined by individuals rather than an industrial complex like bitcoin and ethereum have become. Counterintuitively, I think this also makes it more susceptible to nation state attacks, since you can easily deputize fleets of existing CPUs to 51% attack the network, whereas no nation state on the planet can…
Supposedly one of the "worst kept secrets" of Monero is that a lot of the network is being "secured" by, essentially, botnets. Miners who are unaware that they are participating in the network. I guess the controllers of these botnets seem to agree that there's no reason to kill the cash cow and (aside from the fact that they're running a botnet) don't tend to act maliciously towards the network.
It also means that bitcoin miners are completely tied to the success or failure of the bitcoin network, since their hardware is worthless for any other application, and therefore can't be easily coerced to harm the network. A network of miners who have generic chips could be more easily coerced to harm the network since their hardware wouldn't be a complete sunk cost.
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>I’ve dealt with AML/KYC for cryptocurrency businesses with much higher volumes, nobody ever asked for anything crazy. Were they legit businesses or illegal? It makes a difference because there's more than just you and the KYC exchanges reporting, and it's survivor bias to assume they appear the same.
Legal businesses, receiving much larger individual payments from a limited number of clients. > It makes a difference because there's more than just you and the KYC exchanges reporting, and it's survivor bias to assume they appear the same. Exchanges are usually the least of your problems, it’s the banks. Even very high risk businesses don’t face scrutiny which isn’t easily overcome when all of your incoming payments…
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Supposedly one of the "worst kept secrets" of Monero is that a lot of the network is being "secured" by, essentially, botnets. Miners who are unaware that they are participating in the network. I guess the controllers of these botnets seem to agree that there's no reason to kill the cash cow and (aside from the fact that they're running a botnet) don't tend to act maliciously towards the network.
Yeah, this is one of the big advantages of bitcoin's ASIC race that has long ago obsoleted CPUs and GPUs for mining. It means that bitcoin doesn't economically incentivize botnets stealing valuable generic computation cycles that could actually be put towards better use. Although you could still argue that it's crowding out chip foundries that could otherwise be producing different chips. But you could also argue it'…
Bitcoin hardware isn't worthless for any other application, any other sha256 based network works just fine (see BCH). The problem there is that it is just ripe for 51 attack because there can only be one top coin on each algo/compute layer. BTC = ASIC, ETH = GPU, Monero = CPU. The rest of them are all interesting datapoints on https://www.crypto51.app/
Title is somehow misleading. This is not about uncovering Monero users in the wild and exposing them which are criminals, as I first believed when reading the title. This is about detecting unwanted Monero miner on your system. But if you're already pwned that an unwanted process is already running on your system, a Monero miner is the least of your worries.
It's a bit buried, but the article says: "We want to detect traces of RandomX (the CPU-intensive mining function for Monero) running on a cluster. " This isn't for "Has someone rooted my laptop and started mining Monero on it", this is for "Have any of the nodes in my cluster (of potentially thousands of machines) been rooted and had Monero miners dropped on them." Your comment about being pwned totally applies to yo…
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Nothing, because of the 5th amendment. You pay taxes on stolen gains. The IRS is explicitly forbidden from reporting the gains themselves.
Because of the "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself" part? How does that stop the IRS from telling law enforcement that you've suddenly come into millions of unexplained dollars?
>IRC 6103(i)(1) provides that, pursuant to court order, return information may be shared with law enforcement agencies for investigation and prosecution of non-tax criminal laws.
I feel bad about this because I wrote an article[0] about how to hide Monero miners on Linux systems. Sometimes I ask myself if I should unpublish it as probably some of the criminals doing this type of attacks found it helpful. [0] https://alfon.xyz/posts/hiding-cryptominers-linux
Who cares? It's not your duty to police the net.