Update: I posted about my experience purchasing mining power from a dedicated hosting provider Disclaimer: This is extremely inefficient and will not earn any bitcoin. You will spend $1,000s of VM time for a near 0% chance of earning anything. A $30 USB device is ~100,000x faster for mining. Again: YOU WILL NOT EARN ANY BITCOIN (less than 1c in a month) TL;DR The commands to create a machine in Azure to CPU mine are at the bottom. But don’t bother.

I have been playing with the blockchain lately, most notably the programmable blockchain. Hshare HSR Mining App. I was interested in seeing how difficult it was to set up a machine to mine Bitcoin. What I discovered through my research was that it is possible, but pointless to do CPU mining in the cloud. Why is mining on Azure bad?

While it is easy to set it up, CPU mining is extremely inefficient. Mining on CPUs was depreceated a long time ago when it was discovered that it was faster to do on GPUs. But now even GPUs have been deprecated in favor of power efficient ASIC machines Here are some hardware comparisions of ASIC devices from There are even cheap USB devices that you can plug in that give you GIGAhashes/second How did my Azure miner go? My 2 core Azure machine costs $85/month, and doing CPU only getting me 4.24+4.25= 8.5 kilohash/second (0.0000085 GH/s), compare that to the 3.6 GH/s that an ASIC $30 USB device provides.

ASIC Dash Miner is in. And I certainly don’t want to have a virtual machine installed for mining since it usually takes longer to test. Medium member since. Ethereum works in a decentralized way through a virtual machine called. Chained algorithms make Dash easier to use for mining when compared to other cryptocurrencies. The system is implemented as a single decentralized virtual machine. It was proposed by Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Bitcoin Magazine.

And after 2 days of mining I didn’t even get a single hash even accepted by the mining pool, effictivelly making my mining worth 0%. Could this be faster? On Azure, renting servers with a faster CPU (D & G-Series) would net negligble increases due to CPU mining. The upcoming N-Series of VMs will have dedicated GPUs attached that you can offload work to. This would be an order of magnitude faster in mining.

The price per hour of a N-Series VM would be so high that you would be better off just paying to rent dedicated ASIC bitcoin mining rigs e.g. There is a list at the bottom of this blog post Instructions for creating on Azure (if you really want to try it) • Sign up for a mining pool e.g. (to give you a higher chance of getting a trickle) • login to • create a new Ubuntu virtual machine from the marketplace. I recommend Ubuntu on a basic size VM as we won’t be using the features of standard • use Putty to remotely connect to your VM • Install bitcoind (bitcoin daemon) sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bitcoin/bitcoin sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install bitcoin-qt • Configure bitcoind Run bitcoind to see instructions on what should be in the bitcoin.conf Create a bitcoin.conf file under ~/.bitcoin sudo nano ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf • Install a miner (cpuminer). Instructions from sudo apt-get install build-essential libcurl4-openssl-dev wget tar xzf pooler-cpuminer-*.tar.gz cd cpuminer-*./configure CFLAGS=”-O3″ make • start the miner to test it all works./minerd -o stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:3333 –u -p X • add the miner to startup. Edit /etc/rc.local to add it sudo nano /etc/rc.local Then on a line before exit 0, add the full path of your startup command with & at the end of the line e.g.

/home/youruser/cpuminerXYZ/minerd -o stratum+tcp://mint. How To Mine For Experience Points XP Cash more. bitminter.com:3333 –u -p X &.

Azure Security Center helps customers deal with myriads of threats using advanced analytics backed by global threat intelligence. In addition, a team of security researchers often work directly with customers to gain insight into security incidents affecting Microsoft Azure customers, with the goal of constantly improving Security Center detection and alerting capabilities.

In the previous blog post ', security researchers detailed the stages of one real-world attack campaign that began with a brute force attack detected by Security Center and the steps taken to investigate and remediate the attack. In this post, we’ll focus on an Azure Security Center detection that led researchers to discover a ring of mining activity, which made use of a well-known bitcoin mining algorithm named Cryptonight.

Before we get into the details, let’s quickly explain some terms that you’ll see throughout this blog. “Bitcoin Miners” are a special class of software that use mining algorithms to generate or “mine” bitcoins, which are a form of digital currency. Mining software is often flagged as malicious because it hijacks system hardware resources like the Central Processing Unit (CPU) or Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) as well as network bandwidth of an affected host.

Cryptonight is one such mining algorithm which relies specifically on the host’s CPU. In our investigations, we’ve seen bitcoin miners installed through a variety of techniques including malicious downloads, emails with malicious links, attachments downloaded by already-installed malware, peer to peer file sharing networks, and through cracked installers/bundlers.

Initial Azure Security Center alert details Our initial investigation started when Azure Security Center detected suspicious process execution and created an alert like the one below. The alert provided details such as date and time of the detected activity, affected resources, subscription information, and included a link to a detailed report about hacker tools like the one detected in this case. We began a deeper investigation, which revealed the initial compromise was through a suspicious download that got detected as “HackTool: Win32/Keygen'. We suspect one of the administrators on the box was trying to download tools that are usually used to patch or 'crack' some software keys. Malware is frequently installed along with these tools allowing attackers a backdoor and access to the box. • Based on our log analysis, the attack began with the creation of a user account named “*server$”. • The “*server$” account then created a scheduled task called 'ngm”.

This task launched a batch script named 'kit.bat” located in the 'C: Windows Temp ngmtx' folder. • We then observed process named ' servies.exe“ being launched with cryptonight related parameters. • Note: The ‘ bond007.01’ represents the bitcoin user’s account behind this activity and ‘x’ represents the password.

Two days later we observed the same activity with different file names. In the screenshot below, sst.bat has now replaced kit.bat and mstdc.exe has replaced servies.exe. This same cycle of batch file and process execution was observed periodically. These.bat scripts appear to be used for making connections to the crypto net pool (XCN or Shark coin) and launched by a scheduled task that restarts these connections approximately every hour. Additional Observation: The downloaded executables used for connecting to the bitcoin service and generating the bitcoins are renamed from the original, 32.exe or 64.exe, to “mstdc.exe” and “servies.exe” respectively. These executable’s naming schemes are based on an old technique used by attackers trying to hide malicious binaries in plain sight.

The technique attempts to make files look like legitimate benign-sounding Windows filenames. • Mstdc.exe: “ mstdc.exe” looks like “ msdtc.exe” which is a legitimate executable on Windows systems, namely Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator required by various applications such as Microsoft Exchange or SQL Server installed in clusters. • Servies.exe: Similarly, “ services.exe” is a legitimate Service Control Manager (SCM) is a special system process under the Windows NT family of operating systems, which starts, stops and interacts with Windows service processes. Here again attackers are trying to hide by using similar looking binaries. “ Servies.exe” and “ services.exe”, they look very similar, don’t they? Great tactic used by attackers.

As we did our timeline log analysis, we noted other activity including wscript.exe using the “VBScript.Encode” to execute ‘test.zip’. On extraction, it revealed ‘iissstt.dat’ file that was communicating with an IP address in Korea. The ‘mofcomp.exe’ command appears to be registering the file iisstt.dat with WMI. The mofcomp.exe compiler parses a file containing MOF statements and adds the classes and class instances defined in the file to the WMI repository. Recommended remediation and mitigation steps The initial compromise was the result of malware installation through cracked installers/bundlers which resulted in complete compromise of the machine. With that, our recommendation was first to rebuild the machine if possible.

However, with the understanding that this sometimes cannot be done immediately, we recommend implementing the following remediation steps: 1. Password Policies: Reset passwords for all users of the affected host and ensure password policies meet best practices. Defender Scan: Run a full antimalware scan using Microsoft Antimalware or another solution, which can flag potential malware. Software Update Consideration: Ensure the OS and applications are being kept up to date. Azure Security Center can help you identify virtual machines that are missing critical and security OS updates. OS Vulnerabilities & Version: Align your OS configurations with the recommended rules for the most hardened version of the OS. For example, do not allow passwords to be saved.

Update the operating system (OS) version for your Cloud Service to the most recent version available for your OS family. Azure Security Center can help you identify OS configurations that do not align with these recommendations as well as Cloud Services running outdates OS version. Backup: Regular backups are important not only for the software update management platform itself, but also for the servers that will be updated.

To ensure that you have a rollback configuration in place in case an update fails, make sure to back up the system regularly. Avoid Usage of Cracked Software: Using cracked software introduces unwanted risk into your home or business by way of malware and other threats that are associated with pirated software. Microsoft highly recommends evading usage of cracked software and following legal software policy as recommended by their respective organization.

More information can be found at: •. • Learn more by reading “”. Email Notification: Finally, configure Azure Security Center to send email notifications when threats like these are detected. • Click on Policy tile in Prevention Section. • On the Security Policy blade, you pick which Subscription you want to configure Email Alerts for. • This brings us to the Security Policy blade.

Click on the Email Notifications option to configure email alerting. An email alert from Azure Security Center will look like the one below. To learn more about Azure Security Center, see the following: • — Learn about Azure Security Center’s advanced detection capabilities. • — Learn how to manage and respond to security alerts.

• — Learn how recommendations help you protect your Azure resources. • — Learn how to monitor the health of your Azure resources. • — Learn how to monitor the health status of your partner solutions. • — Find frequently asked questions about using the service. • — Get the latest Azure security news and information.