Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Cryptocurrency Stealer Delivered From Official Monero Website

The official website for the Monero cryptocurrency was hacked recently and attackers replaced legitimate wallet files offered for download with a malicious version.

The official website for the Monero cryptocurrency was hacked recently and attackers replaced legitimate wallet files offered for download with a malicious version.

The breach was discovered on November 18 after someone noticed that the hashes for the Linux CLI wallet available for download on getmonero.org did not match the hashes provided by the software’s developers.

An investigation revealed that some of the legitimate wallet files had been replaced with a malicious version. Fortunately, the malicious files were not available for download for very long, but at least one user claimed that their wallet was drained after downloading a manipulated file.

Monero users have been instructed to check the hashes of their CLI wallet binaries if they were downloaded on Monday, November 18, between 2:30 AM UTC and 4:30 PM UTC.

“If [the hashes] don’t match the official ones, delete the files and download them again. Do not run the compromised binaries for any reason,” the Monero team said.

Researcher Bart Blaze has analyzed one of the malicious Linux wallets and discovered that it was designed to steal the victim’s seed — the seed allows users to access their funds in cryptocurrency wallets — and exfiltrate funds from their wallet.

The malware communicates with a command and control (C&C) server that was also found to host a Windows version of the malware, which is also designed to steal seeds and funds.

It’s currently unclear how the attackers managed to plant the malware on the official website, but the Monero team has promised to provide more information once it has completed its investigation into the incident.

Monero (XMR) is one of the top 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies and 1 XMR is currently worth roughly $60.

Related: Hackers Steal $40 Million in Bitcoin From Cryptocurrency Exchange Binance

Related: Illegal Cryptocurrency Mining at Ukraine Nuclear Plant Exposed Sensitive Data

Related: Hackers Steal Millions from Cryptocurrency Exchange Bitrue

Related: Macs Infected With New Monero-Mining Malware

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Cybercrime

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Application Security

PayPal is alerting roughly 35,000 individuals that their accounts have been targeted in a credential stuffing campaign.

Cybercrime

No one combatting cybercrime knows everything, but everyone in the battle has some intelligence to contribute to the larger knowledge base.

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...