Amazon Web Services User Pays $45,000 Over Monero Miners
SEO Scout founder Johnny Platt has recently fallen victim to Monero cryptocurrency hackers.
Some unidentified bad actors hacked his Amazon Web Services (AWS) account and used it for mining Monero for several weeks, which resulted in the company billing Platt for $45,000.
The attackers reportedly launched a mining script on AWS Lambda. Every three minutes, it launched itself on different Lambda installations and mined crypto for the maximum allowed 15 minutes. Collectively, the hackers mined 6 XMR (about $800).
Platt believes Amazon could have detected the scammers. He said:
“The script was an unencrypted text file, and AWS could easily find lines of code used in similar attacks in it to suspect something was wrong.”
A few days later, Amazon responded to the user’s complaint and dropped all charges in a one-time exception.
