Miners in the Cloud: Measuring and Analyzing Cryptocurrency Mining in Public Clouds
Ayodeji Adeniran, David Mohaisen

TL;DR
This study analyzes the relationship between cryptocurrency mining pools and public cloud providers using passive DNS data, revealing significant associations, security risks, and a shift towards mining Metaverse currencies.
Contribution
It provides the first large-scale analysis of mining pool associations with public clouds, highlighting security risks and the evolving landscape of cryptocurrency mining.
Findings
24 cloud providers associated with mining pools, with Amazon and Google accounting for 48%
Heavy-tailed distribution indicating preferential attachment in associations
Approximately 30-35% of cloud endpoints linked to malicious activities
Abstract
Cryptocurrencies, arguably the most prominent application of blockchains, have been on the rise with a wide mainstream acceptance. A central concept in cryptocurrencies is "mining pools", groups of cooperating cryptocurrency miners who agree to share block rewards in proportion to their contributed mining power. Despite many promised benefits of cryptocurrencies, they are equally utilized for malicious activities; e.g., ransomware payments, stealthy command, control, etc. Thus, understanding the interplay between cryptocurrencies, particularly the mining pools, and other essential infrastructure for profiling and modeling is important. In this paper, we study the interplay between mining pools and public clouds by analyzing their communication association through passive domain name system (pDNS) traces. We observe that 24 cloud providers have some association with mining pools as…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSpam and Phishing Detection · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques · Network Security and Intrusion Detection
