Cryptocurrency miners are increasingly abusing the free tiers of cloud service providers. Continuous integration (CI) providers have become victims of bad actors submitting large numbers of jobs under multiple and frequently changing accounts. Similarly, providers of other types of web services are seeing cryptocurrency operations running in containers, pods, and virtual machines.
These activities hurt customers and other free trial users because miners are pushing CPU capacity to its limits and slowing down operations. In addition, engineering resources are wasted tracking and blocking miners. They shift from node to node and frequently change methods, resulting in a cat-and-mouse game with engineering teams.
Shoreline’s Cryptocurrency Mining Op Pack, detects cryptocurrency mining operations in your containers, pods, and VMs through:
The Op Pack can kill these unwanted applications, ban users, and record the event to prevent these instances from happening in the future.