TECH NEWS – A recently discovered Java vulnerability has netted the equivalent of 33 million forints in just over a week with HP’s AMD EPYC processor, which is not a bad payday…

Einnews reports that Java’s Log4J exploit affects more prominent brands, such as AMD, badly. The hackers targetted HP’s 9000 servers, as these are using AMD EPYC processors, and they were able to get through the hardware blocks, giving them access to more servers. The site explains what happened:

“Raptoreum’s total network hash rate had increased over the past few weeks, but out of nowhere, it grew from 200 MH/S to 400MH/S with a single address contributing an additional 100 – 200MH/S to the Raptoreum network. During the attack, many servers were breached, each outputting a significant amount of hash power on very high-end server equipment. Very few organizations have their hands on this kind of hardware, making it extremely unlikely that the attack was created using the individual’s hardware.

Through a private investigation, there is now strong evidence that suggests Hewlett-Packard 9000 AMD EPYC server hardware was being used to mine Raptoreum coins. We discovered that the miners they were utilizing were all given HP nicknames and were all stopped abruptly, which fortifies speculation of a company breach, followed by a patch of the servers. The Log4J Raptoreum mining exploit started on December 9th until it mostly ended on December 17th. During this period, hackers collected approximately 30% of the total block reward, which is roughly 3.4 million Raptoreum RTM, worth around $110,000 as of 12/21/2021. Although activity has dropped considerably, it is still mining on what still looks to be a single premium machine that has failed to patch.

Sources show that roughly 1.5 million of the mined Raptoreum coins have been sold on the CoinEx cryptocurrency exchange to date, while 1.7 million RTM currently remain in a wallet. With a 40% increase in value during the exploit, the dumping of the coins had a slight negative effect in the short term for the project. Distributed networks such as Raptoreum, secured through mining, node integrity, and free-market perseverance, can resist individuals with many stolen server equipment. Other coins might not be so lucky depending on the spirit of their communities and the depth of their market volume,” the site wrote.

Raptoreum is a new crypto mining algorithm based on GhostRider that aims to keep the Raptoreum blockchain network clean of ASICs. The GhostRider algorithm uses a modified x16r and a Crpytonite algorithm (it uses the L3 cache for mining), and for this reason, AMD processors seem to be a good choice. Older Ryzen 9 3900/3900X CPUs have up to 64 MB of L3, and Threadripper and EPYC can have 128/256 megabytes of cache.

Somebody’s been looking into the cost of the Christmas feast. For the rest of their lives.

Source: WCCFTech