Crooks use Synology NAS boxen to mine Dogecoin, yells Dell Dell says skilled attackers have made a staggering $620,000 in the Dogecoin crypto-currency by exploiting vulnerable Synology network attached storage (NAS) boxes. The clever hackers pulled off the largest heist of its kind by planting mining gear on the NAS boxes to borrow their computational might - many NAS now boast grunty …
Its called a joke, son.
I'm sure if AC didn't want to compromise themselves by being something other than AC (its performance art, he/she/it does this on nearly every security related story here that isn't a Snowdenspaff™) they'd use their actual username put a joke alert icon in.
Explaining why a joke is funny kind of sucks, if you don't get it, then you just don't get it I guess.
It wasn't too long ago that if you dared venture into the comments on any security article on El Reg you would find a chorus of reworded versions of the same comment that AC is saying over and over with a few actually helpful and insightful comments along the way from people who knew what they were talking about, some mandatory Linux user smugness, and every now and then a Mac user.
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Surely that is the main selling point of a NAS? You want you data, music, video etc when you're out of the house. Your own ... cough ... 'private cloud' (sorry, not my term).
There's nothing wrong with doing that if it is secured and securing it isn't that hard (there's plenty of internet facing servers - websites for one). However all devices need to be kept up to date with the latest security patches.
"Put your NAS on the Internet?"
I have plans to make part of it available to the outside world, but I'm still doing research on how to secure it. It's a lot more work than you would think it is - especially when the majority suggestions are "just don't do it". Which I suppose are somewhat justified, if not helpful.
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I call bullshait!. Especially on the 500 million coins number. These NAS boxes run, mostly, dual core Atom processors. I've tested them. They might get a 5 KH/s rate mining Dogecoin. It would take 200 boxes to get to 1 MH/s. Back in January a 1 M hash rate might have gotten you 1500 Dogecoins per day. It would take 33,334 days to get 500 million coins at 1500 coins/day. Even if you hijacked the E3 Xeon Synology boxes, it would take a lot of boxes a long time to get to 500 Million coins.
Such questions. Bad smells. WOW!
We have a four-year-old Synology box - it's one of the lower-range ARM-based models - and whilst it does what we need (mostly: an extra drive and a server for the Logitech Squeezebox in the lounge), to say it's hardly a speed-demon is like saying Antarctica is hardly a good location for a beach resort.
If I'd seen this story last night, I might've thought our Syno had been p0wned (sp?) for Tulipbulbcoin-mining, it was running so slowly. Turned out it was "only" indexing some photos I'd uploaded - I really should look into setting it up so it does the indexing overnight, as the Syno is effectively unusable while it devotes its resources to that titanic task. (Remember the coffee-machine on the Heart Of Gold and the Vogons attacking? Yup: same effect.)
So, prospective BitGold-miners looking to hijack our Syno for some wealth-generation on the QT: I suggest you look elsewhere. You'll be lucky to get the equivalent of a few coppers out of the old jalopy, and I'll get so honked-off at the box slowing to a crawl that I'll end up rebooting it at the first opportunity.
I think the chap down the road might have an Atom-based one, though... ;-)
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