Google recent report reveals that several of recently hacked accounts on its Google Cloud Platform service were used to mine cryptocurrencies.
According to the report for November stated that hackers have been observed conducting cryptocurrency mining within compromised Cloud accounts.
The report stated: “Of 50 recently compromised GCP instances, 86% of the compromised Google Cloud instances were used to perform cryptocurrency mining, a cloud resource-intensive for-profit activity, which typically consumed CPU/GPU resources, or in cases of Chia mining, storage space.”
According to Google the majority of the attack cases involved “poor” practices on the part of Cloud users or third-party applications that introduced the vulnerabilities.
Google explained: “As shown in Table 2, 48% of compromised instances were attributed to actors gaining access to the Internet-facing Cloud instance, which had either no password or a weak password for user accounts or API connections.
As a result, these Google Cloud instances could be easily scanned and brute forced. 26% of compromised instances were attributed to vulnerabilities in third-party software, which was installed by the owner.”