Players of League of Legends (LOL) in the Philippines apparently have become the latest unsuspecting victims of a malicious software that turns their gadgets into an unwilling cryptocurrency miner, particularly for the Monero cryptocurrency.
Several media reported that a Filipino Reddit user with the nickname Lestergonzaga has discovered that clients of the Garena server of the popular Internet game have been used to mine the Monero currency without even noticing it as the process worked silently in the background, connected to Coinhive.com - a cryptocurrency mining program.
The Daily Sports reported that Lestergonzaga has informed fans of his discovery by writing on the official League of Legends subreddit. His post quickly gained the attention of fans and generated more than 12,00 upvotes, with a majority of the players blaming Garena for allowing the malware.
Some of the users were quick to suggest that not only LOL players, but all Garena+ clients were infected by the malware. Garena immediately took to remove the unauthorized program from its system.
"There was an unauthorized modification of the League of Legends PH client lobby where a certain JavaScript code was inserted," Garena said in a Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) post.
"This code performs blockchain mining on affected computers, which consumes CPU resources from these computers. Apart from increased CPU usage, extensive analysis from our security engineers has determined that there is no other impact on affected computers."
Garena also wrote that, apart from increasing the CPU usage, the code has not affected the computers of users in any other way. The code was removed and Garena pledged that this will never happen again.
“We are treating this issue as a serious security matter with the highest priority,” Garena said.
Josh Grunzweig, a researcher at Palo Alto Networks, has found that roughly 5% of all Monero cryptocurrency in circulation has been mined through hacking.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest