For two years a malware called Lemon Duck infects computers to mine Monero. In the last two months his activity has increased at an alarming rate.
Cisco Talos researchers have been monitoring the Lemon Duck botnet since December 2018. Since August they have seen a large increase in the number of communications with the servers that control Lemon Duck activity.
Cisco Talos notes that malware is designed to spread in many ways.
Sometimes new computers are automatically infected using known vulnerabilities such as EternalBlue - which was also used by the famous malware WannaCry.
Like many other malicious groups software that have spread since the start of the Coronavirus pandemic, Lemon Duck is also using phishing emails for COVID-19.
Emails are very simple with theme the pandemic, (“COVID-19” or “The Truth of COVID-19”) and contain from an infected document of Microsoft Word.
Mining cryptocurrencies like Monero can be a very intensive process. The harder the processors work, the more heat they generate. Without sufficient cooling to compensate for the heating, the hardware is at risk.
The criminals behind Lemon Duck want to make sure their operation is profitable. This is why Lemon Duck checks infected machines and shuts them down.
