5 Percent of Monero in Circulation Was Mined Through Malware, Research Finds

A June 11 report by network and enterprise security company Palo Alto Networks has found that around 5 percent of all Monero in circulation was mined maliciously.

Josh Grunzweig of the Unit 42 threat research team collected data - around 470,000 unique samples - on how many cryptojacking miners have been identified within the Palo Alto Network WildFire platform.

The report finds 3,773 emails connected with mining pools, 2,995 mining pools URLs, 2,341 XRM wallets, 981 Bitcoin wallets, 131 Electroneum wallets, 44 Ethereum wallets, and 28 Litecoin wallets.

According to Grunzweig, Monero has an "Incredible monopoly" on the cryptocurrencies targeted by malware, with a total of $175 mln mined maliciously.

Monero has a total market cap of around $1.9 bln, trading for around $119 and down around 10 percent over a 24 hour period to press time.

Of the 2,341 Monero wallets found, only 55 percent have more than 0.01 XMR.The report also notes that the data does not include web-based Monero miners or other miners they could not access, meaning that the 5 percent is most likely too low of a calculation.

According to the report, the total hashrate for Monero cryptojacking - around 19 mega-hashes per second bringing in about $30,443 a day - is equal to about 2 percent of the Monero network's global hashing power.

In an email to Cointelegraph, Justin Ehrenhofer of the Monero Malware Response WorkGroup wrote that because Monero is "Built without any explicit use cases," people "May take advantage of Monero's privacy and accessible proof of work features for their own illegitimate personal gain."

"The Monero community is interested in helping victims of unwanted system mining and other nefarious actions We will never be able to prevent every machine from being compromised. The proportion of coins estimated to be mined with Monero speaks largely to the number of machines that are compromised. In addition to mining Monero, they could be sending spam and monitoring users. We hope that our contributions will limit unwanted behavior at the source."

Yesterday, Japanese police reported they have opened an investigation into a case of Monero cryptojacking with the use of the Coinhive mining software.