With its dramatic growth and the billions of dollars worth of assets traded every day, it is no surprise that the cryptocurrency market has become a lucrative target for hackers who devise all sorts of clever ways to get their hands on some crypto money relatively easily.
Indeed, one of them is Ryan Montgomery, an ‘ethical hacker’ who infiltrates websites hosting child exploitation and exposes the predators, and he has explained how he used his skills to mine cryptocurrency in an episode of the Shawn Ryan Show, hosted by former United States Navy Seal and CIA contractor Shawn Ryan, published on May 8.
Hacking to mine crypto
As Montgomery explained, he had infected “a ton of computers,” which allowed him to “control your keyboard, your mouse, look at your screen, do anything I want without you knowing that I’m there.” However, instead of taking control of these computers, he used them to mine crypto:
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“At that time, it was just Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC). I had quite a bit of infected computers mining at all times. The thing that I did that was, if you could say ‘nice,’ was that when the computer was idle, it would use 100% of the processor and the graphics card to mine the coins. And when the computer was in use, it would only use 20%.”
According to him, this was his way to minimize the negative effect on the users whose devices he had hacked, “so they wouldn’t have a horrible experience with their computer just being bogged down the entire time.”
Asked by the podcast host to estimate the number of computers hacked in this way, Montgomery admitted that there were probably “tens of thousands” of computers mining cryptocurrency and going into a mining pool. That said, he said he had stopped doing that due to “morals” and other business opportunities.
Watch the entire video below:
