North Korea could be secretly mining cryptocurrency on your computer

North Korea has a cryptocurrency infatuation.

Its government has been accused of unleashing a global ransomware attack to raise bitcoin, mining the cryptocurrency within its borders, and hacking South Korean bitcoin exchanges. Now, research firm Recorded Future says there’s a strong chance Kim Jong-un’s regime is experimenting with malware that secretly mines currency using other people’s computers.

Malware crypto-mining is a new global trend among hackers, says a new report (pdf) from Recorded Future, which monitors discussions among “the criminal underground” on the so-called dark web. Starting this year, hackers seem to be shifting away from high-intensity, widespread ransomware attacks, towards “long-term, low velocity” crypto-mining in the background.

Recorded Future has not detected specific instances of North Korean malware mining, but believes that the regime has the knowhow, motive, and interest in cryptocurrencies to execute similar attacks. “North Korean threat actors have prior experience in assembling and managing botnets, bitcoin mining, and cryptocurrency theft, as well as in custom altering publicly available malware; three elements that would be key to effectively creating and managing a network of covert cryptocurrency miners,” Recorded Future’s report reads.

Recorded Future says hackers are shifting to malware mining because ransomware attacks became too egregious, attracting law enforcement’s attention instead of generating the steady stream of income attackers had grown to expect since the method became fashionable in 2015. “Outrageous attacks on healthcare facilities and municipal transit systems culminated in the unprecedented WannaCry and NotPetya campaigns,” according to Recorded Future’s report. “Overnight, ransomware was recognized as an act of cyberterrorism.”

With ransomware a hot potato, hackers turned to installing hidden crypto-miners on others’ machines. This has turned out to be a relatively stable, low-fuss way of getting cash, according to Recorded Future. One hacker on a Russian-language forum expressed surprise at how easy it was to create a network of secret cryptominers: “I’ve used ‘bots’ already under my control to upload 110 miners before going to sleep. By the time I woke up 108 were still alive, which took me by surprise. I expected half would be dead by then.“

The cryptocurrencies most popularly mined in secret are monero, and zcash, says Andrei Barysevich, an author of the Recorded Future report. These cryptocurrencies require less computational resources to mine profitably compared to something like bitcoin. However, one malware mining example obtained by the firm hijacked a computer’s graphics card to mine ethereum.

There’s no blanket way to detect a malware miner on your computer right now because the method is new, and the software keeps changing, Barysevich says. But a noticeable slowdown in a computer’s performance could suggest that it it’s surreptitiously churning out a cryptocurrency—possibly destined for a North Korean digital wallet.

North Korea may be mining bitcoin in addition to hacking it

Last month, North Korea was banned from exporting coal to China, its biggest buyer. The rogue regime may have found a new use for these idle coal supplies: powering bitcoin mines. That’s according to research by Recorded Future, an information security firm that counts the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm among its investors, and security non-profit Team Cymru. The research identified activity that the firms believe is bitcoin mining in North Korea starting on May 17. The analysts don’t know if the mining is ongoing, but the activity was present in the last data point Recorded Future collected, from July 6, the firm told Quartz.

Bitcoin mining consumes large amounts of electricity to feed the vast computational power necessary for miners to release new supplies of bitcoin. The bitcoin network releases 12.5 bitcoins (about $50,000 worth, at the current bitcoin price) every 10 minutes to a miner as an incentive for checking bitcoin transactions and adding them to the cryptocurrency’s immutable, distributed ledger, known as the blockchain.

Bitcoin mines are generally large server farms containing thousands of machines specifically designed to mine the cryptocurrency. One of the world’s largest bitcoin mines, in Inner Mongolia, runs an electricity bill of $39,000 a day. North Korea is among the top 10 net exporters of coal globally, according to the International Energy Agency (pdf, p.17). Since the country can no longer earn revenue from coal exports, it makes sense that it might put some coal to use generating electricity for a bitcoin mine.

Recorded Future also found that North Korean elites, who have unrestricted access to the internet, were using virtual private networks (VPNs) to make online purchases with bitcoin. These North Korean VPN users were also checking their Gmail accounts, logging into Twitter, buying expensive sneakers, and watching porn. The firm was able to track the activity because the VPNs and other traffic-masking techniques were used incorrectly, it said.

The researchers couldn’t tell how much processing power North Korea’s suspected bitcoin mines possess. But they believe it’s just one part of a larger strategy to generate revenue for the increasingly isolated regime. Previously FireEye, another security firm, found evidence that North Korean hackers were targeting South Korean bitcoin exchanges to steal their crypto funds. North Korea is also believed to be behind the global ransomware attack WannaCry, which froze computer systems and demanded a bitcoin payment to unlock them.

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