Network Hijacker Steals $83,000 In Bitcoin

An anonymous reader writes with news that bogus BGP announcements can be used to hijack work done by cryptocurrency mining pools. Quoting El Reg: Researchers at Dell's SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) have identified an exploit that can be used to steal cryptocurrency from mining pools — and they claim that at least one unknown miscreant has already used the technique to pilfer tens of thousands of dollars in digital cash. The heist was achieved by using bogus Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) broadcasts to hijack networks belonging to multiple large hosting companies, including Amazon, Digital Ocean, and OVH, among others. After sending the fake BGP updates miners unknowingly contributed work to the attackers' pools.

Comments

Where is the validation?

[jbmartin6]

Apparently he was able to spoof some control messages to the miners since their only validation was IP address. It is an interesting question: since they should have known about this BGP vulnerability which has been used before, why didn't their minerserver communication have stronger validation? The answer would be, I think, that they didn't bother since it happens so rarely. Probably from now on they will start using another layer of validation. Yet another example of how security happens in the real world: it doesn't get used until the pain gets bad enough.

So really bitcoin is incidental

[DarkOx]

So what we have here are two problems.

One lack of authentication for the miners with the pools. Something a few SSL on the servers and wrapping those sockets calls with openSSL would make the route hijacking ineffective for stealing mining resources.

So there is a lesson in this whatever it is you are doing on the internet if you care AT ALL about it you should be using SSL and checking certs, (Looking at your slashdot) sure there are tons of problems as weaknesses in SSL but until something better comes along its beats the hell out of clear text with no authentication what so ever.

Two BGP needs to be replaced or updated to support much stronger authentication and the network operators need to just push getting it done, even if it means telling customers we can't / won't peer with you and neither will anyone else unless you get you routers and or software update to do this. If they stick together in it there should be no trouble getting that done.

Stealing some computer cycles used to generate bit coins is probably among the least real harm someone with access to advertise bogus routes in BGP could do; and lots of people are in a position to do that. We should be thankful its only a little money these guys were making off with. The Internet has gotten to big for the network operators to just relay on everyone playing nice and being good citizens, We need some stronger technical controls put in place and regular auditing beyound well nobody has complained on NANOG.