According to American technology giant Google, miners of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have used hacked Google Cloud accounts to intensify mining activities in the cloud.
The breach of Google’s platform security was revealed in a report Wednesday by the company’s cybersecurity team. The report entitled “Threat Horizons” provides intelligence to organizations to try to maintain a secure environment in the cloud.
“Malicious actors were observed mining cryptocurrencies within compromised Cloud instances,” the Google report stated.
Google Cloud customers can use the computing power of the platform for their activities including cryptocurrency mining. Google’s cloud service offers remote data and file storage to its customers off-site.
Google revealed that of the 50 Google Cloud accounts that were compromised, around 86% were breached by hackers to mine cryptocurrencies. According to the report, within 22 seconds of the account breach, the cryptocurrency mining software was downloaded.
Another fact highlighted in the report is that about 10% of the compromised accounts were used to scan other resources that are available on the Internet to identify vulnerable systems. 8% of the instances were used to carry out attacks on other targets.
