The founder of SEO Scout, Johnny Platt, became a victim of hackers mining the Monero cryptocurrency.
Unknown people hacked his Amazon Web Services (AWS) account and used it for mining for several weeks. As a result, the company billed Platt for $45,000.
As it turned out, the attackers launched a script for mining on AWS Lambda. Every three minutes, he launched himself on different Lambda installations and mined cryptocurrency for the maximum allowable 15 minutes. In total, the hackers extracted 6 XMR (about $800).
Platt is sure that Amazon could detect fraudsters.
“The script was an unencrypted text file, and AWS could easily find lines of code used in similar attacks in it to suspect something was wrong,” he wrote.
A few days later, Amazon responded to the user’s complaint and dropped all charges against him in the form of a one-time exception.
Recall that in August, Splunk specialists reported hacking Windows servers inside Amazon Web Service, which were used for hidden mining of Monero through the desktop version of the Telegram messenger.