Supercomputers in Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and the UK were hacked in the attack.
Incidents involving supercomputers getting infected with crypto-mining malware by company employees to gain monetary benefits have been reported in the past. But, this is the first time that hackers have managed to accomplish the same on a large scale proving that even supercomputers are prone to hacking nowadays.
According to reports, there have been multiple incidents across the UK, Switzerland, Germany, and other parts of Europe including a high-performance computer facility in Spain, where unknown hackers installed cryptocurrency mining malware in supercomputers. The computers have now been shut down until the investigations are underway.
See: Hackers mining Monero on Microsoft SQL databases for last 2 years
The first such incident was reported last week by the University of Edinburgh running the ARCHER supercomputer. It was observed that somebody tried to exploit the logic nodes of the supercomputer. The organization immediately shut it down after resetting its SSH password to prevent further intrusion.
On Monday, a similar incident was reported by the bwHPC, which is responsible for coordinating research projects across supercomputers located in the state of Baden-Württemberg, Germany.
Resultantly, five of the most high-performing computing clusters were shut down including bwUniCluster 2.0 ( hackers compromise supercomputers across europe cryptominers
