A special virus has been discovered in China aimed at attacking mining equipment created by the company Bitmain. It is noted that the virus attacks Antminer from Bitmain and extorts 10 BTC from their owners under the threat of overheating the device and causing it to fail. Currently, losses from its activity amount to several tens of thousands of dollars.

As in many other cases, users themselves infect the devices using special firmware for overclocking the equipment. While at standard frequencies ASIC miners produce about 13.5 Th/s, with the help of special firmware the device's performance can be increased to 18 Th/s. One of these firmwares turned out to be infected with a virus. "In the field of mining, Avalon devices are controlled by microcomputers based on Linux – Raspberry Pi. And Ant Mine miners have a built-in control panel created using Linux, which gives the virus a chance," noted BTC.Top founder Jiang Zhuo. Specialists also note that the virus is quickly transmitted from one device to another. Because of the virus, output is reduced several times, due to which the operation of the farm becomes unprofitable even in regions with cheap electricity.

It is noteworthy that the virus does not immediately begin to extort money, and for some time does not make itself known. Miner Wang Wei said that the virus changed the address for mining bitcoins and 4,000 devices were sending the mined bitcoins to the hacker's address. Thus, in one night the hacker earned $8,000.

As reported, specialists have already found a solution to eliminate the virus. And getting rid of the virus is not difficult – to do this it is enough just to format the SD card, which corresponds to reinstalling the operating system from scratch. However, this process is quite lengthy and takes up to 4 days. However, due to the fact that large farms use a large amount of equipment, and they have to be stopped for several days, ASIC miners incur colossal losses.

Information about the malware first appeared in August of last year. Then it was noticed in the Antminer S9, T9, and even in the litecoin miner L3+. And, according to a study conducted by the antivirus company McAfee, in 2018 the number of installations of malware for cryptocurrency mining grew more than 40 times. At the same time, about 5% of the digital currency Monero was mined using malware.

BTC.Top founder Jiang Zhuo noted that in the mining industry, due to the spread of malware on Linux, its control should be addressed. Currently this is impossible to do, since the OS is considered completely autonomous and available for making changes only to users.