Hackers mining Monero on Microsoft SQL databases for last 2 years

Hackers mining Monero on Microsoft SQL databases for last 2 years

Microsoft has been doing a tremendous job in tackling cybercrime but lately, it has been facing large scale cyber attacks which is understandable since it’s a technology giant.


In the latest, the IT security researchers at Guadricore have revealed that a botnet called “Vollgar” has been attacking Microsoft SQL (MSSQL) databases from 120+ IP addresses with the majority of them originating from China – The attack has been going on since May 2018.


Done through brute-forcing techniques; the malware aims to mine cryptocurrencies using these databases once it has succeeded in gaining control. Currently, the cryptocurrencies being mined are the V-Dimension (Vollar) and Monero, the latter being a very popular choice in this space due to its widely known anonymity features.


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Elaborating further on the statistics, 61% of machines remained infected for only 2 days or less, 21.8% for more than 7-14 days with 17.1% of them being affected repeatedly. The lattermost case may happen because of a lack of security measures in place which would fail to eradicate the malware completely the first time it infected the server.

Countries most infected include China, India, the US, South Korea, and Turkey.