I'm still a total Monero noob. Actually, I'm still a noob to all of the privacy coins as well....so, I'll get caught up on this....
In the meantime, this story caught my attention this morning in one of my security blogs that I subscribe to.
Hackers were able to find an exploit that existed in Microsoft 2003 Server which enabled them to turn web servers into botnets to mine Monero. Now, since Monero is CPU/GPU mining and resistant to ASIC, web-based public-facing servers were the ideal target. In addition, the security and privacy of Monero made it an ideal coin to have attackers mine.
Personally, I think this is genius. There's not an element of actual "stealing" here in terms of property, but they were stealing CPU/GPU power of course. Things like this will continue to happen more frequently as cryptos become more valuable and more well known/accepted. It seems like every week I see or post something about the latest attack on cryptos.
I'm actually curious to know how much money is being generated in this same way that no one's caught or found out about yet. I guarantee that it's happening a bunch.
If you want to read up more on the actual exploit, you can check it out here.
Stay safe everyone!