Officials at Transneft told Reuters on Friday
its computers had been used for the unauthorized mining of the cryptocurrency
monero. Monero is the eleventh-largest virtual currency with a market cap of
over $5 billion.
“Incidents where the company’s hardware was used
to manufacture cryptocurrency have been found. It could have a negative impact
on the productivity of our processing capacity,” according to Transneft Vice President
Vladimir Rushailo
Rushailo did not elaborate on
whether this hacking attack was the first of its kind.
Software for mining cryptocurrency was
automatically downloaded from the web by a Transneft computer and then deleted,
company spokesman Igor Demin told the media. He added Transneft had programs to
prevent this from happening again.
According to industry experts, hackers are
increasingly using corporate computers to mine cryptocurrencies.
“More and more people have learnt that, in
fact, they do not even need to stand up from the sofa to make money – if they
are not caught”, the head of
information security projects with Croc IT firm Pavel Lutsik told Reuters.
Anyone attempting to hack corporate servers
faces between six and ten years in prison under Russian law, according to
Lutsik.
Russia is currently working on regulating
virtual currencies. President Vladimir Putin has ordered the government to
create legislation governing the status of bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies,
mining and initial coin offerings, as well as defining everything that relates
to digital money, by July 2018.
source: rt
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