Detect Cryptocurrency Mining Operations

Unauthorized cryptocurrency miners must be stopped from abusing free tiers of cloud service providers.

Networking

The problem

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.

The solution

Shoreline’s Cryptocurrency Mining Op Pack, detects cryptocurrency mining operations in your containers, pods, and VMs through:

  • Regex analysis
  • Finding anomalous CPU usage

The Op Pack can kill these unwanted applications, ban users, and record the event to prevent these instances from happening in the future.

Highlights

Customer experience impact
Miners use all the CPU capacity
High
Occurrence frequency
Especially for providers who offer free trial
High
Shoreline time to repair
5 minutes
Low
Time to diagnose manually
Security
Cost impact
Can consume significant computer resources
High
Time to repair manually
1 hour
High

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