Hackers tried to crack supercomputers in European countries last week to use their power to mine crypto.
Entire clusters of supercomputers were stabbed in several countries, such as Germany, the UK, Spain, and Switzerland. Hackers tried to crack mainly university machines.
According to tech news outlet ZDNet, several clusters of supercomputers have been forced to shut down in order to investigate the security breach. Reports about security incidents are coming in from the UK, Germany, Switzerland, while another high-performance computer center in Spain is also very likely to have been affected.
Last Monday, the press service of the University of Edinburgh, on whose territory the ARCHER computer operates, was one of the earliest to report an attack.
Then attacks were recorded by major German and Spanish universities. University administrations have decided to turn off computers dur ing the attack.
An expert report from Computer Security Incident Response Team said that, most likely, the hackers received SSH credentials from Canadian and Chinese universities. That's a protocol for the safe operation of services on an insecure network.
Having access to such data, the attackers connected to the site of supercomputers, and then with the help of malicious software, they tried to start mining Monero (XMR) CryptoCurrency. Note that this digital currency is widespread among hackers. They periodically inject viruses into the computers of Internet users to secretly use their power for mining XMR.
The ARCHER supercomputer remains offline until further notice. It is hoped that it will return to service this week.
Shortly after the ARCHER’s incident, major universities’ high-performance computing clusters in the Germany also reported similar security breaches and went offline. More attacks followed later in the week and the following institutions were affected:
Leibniz Computing Center, part of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences,
the Julich Research Center in Julich, Germany,
the Faculty of Physics at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany,
and the Swiss Center of Scientific Computations (CSCS), in Zurich, Switzerland
It is high time we took the issue of cyber security seriously. The nefarious activities of hackers are rife these days.