Telegram became the latest cryptojacking victim – Monero mining

Kaspersky said that its engineers found a vulnerability in a popular messaging app Telegram which made it prone to hacking and more importantly crypto jacking. Kaspersky Lab, a Russian company which specializes in computer security and antivirus software said on its website that its engineers found a malicious software sent via various PC’s and mobiles via Telegram to mine cryptocurrency.

Hackers used the so-called zero-day vulnerability in Telegram to spread their virus. Telegram is a popular messaging app among the cryptocurrency traders as it provides one with the best security features currently. The virus is sent as an image which on downloading corrupts the hardware of the system and mines cryptocurrency secretly without the user knowing it.

Vladislav Kuznetsov, a blockchain developer from Moscow spoke to AMBCrypto and says,

“This is a serious vulnerability exposure. Telegram is used by almost all the ICOs to reach out investors and their communities. Each ICO token on an average has 50K members, even if 10% was affected, that is a huge number at scale”

Analysts say that only Russian hackers were aware of the vulnerability as most of the code is written in Russian language and most of the cases were reported in Russia. There is no clear information since when the attack is running but they were able to say that people using windows operating system were affected from March 2011.

The telegram which was created by a Russian named Pavel Durov in the month of August 2013 is marketed as a secure, reliable, and trusted way to send and messages. This recent event which came to light may hamper its reputation.

The security firm said that,

“reported the vulnerability to Telegram and, at the time of publication, the zero-day flaw has not since been observed in messenger’s products.”

Robert Mir, a Security Analyst for Whitelist Digital spoke to AMBCrypto and says,

“We came to know about this vulnerability because someone discovered this. What I’m worried about is if secure platforms like Telegram are being used then I think a lot of our other daily systems might be already hacked and we won’t even know it till they are revealed to us.

Monero is once again the cryptocurrency targeted by hackers which are being mined through this attack. Earlier this week, the Australian government hacked also revealed that Monero was being mined from the hack.