CryptoJacking
One of the biggest mysteries of the 21st century is who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Bitcoin was created by a person or people using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. In August 2008, a website called bitcoin.org was quietly registered online. Several months later, a paper entitled 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' appeared on some mailing lists. Bitcoin is a software system that allows people to mine bitcoins in a lottery-based system. Today there are two ways to acquire a Bitcoin. You can purchase it from a cryptocurrency exchange in exchange for dollars. The second way you can obtain a Bitcoin is through cryptocurrency mining.
To mine a bitcoin, you must mathematically compute huge, unique numbers. These large numbers are 64 characters digital numbers, commonly called hashes. Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) is used to create these hashes. By using the SHA-256 function, Bitcoin converts plain text ledger information into digitally scrambled hashes (8 bits per byte i.e., 64). It is impossible to reconstruct the original data from the hash value. A brute-force attack would need to make 2^256 attempts to generate the initial data, which is more than the number of atoms in the universe. Bitcoin mining is a computerized guessing game where the first guess with a 64-digit hash lower than or equal to the current hash and closer than all others wins the next bitcoin. I know it's a little more complicated than that, but for now, this will do.
Sounds easy, but it's not. These guesses are very big, hard to compute numbers. The concept is based on the same process used for encryption (cryptology.) The premise is that it is easier to multiply two prime numbers in a computer program than it is to factor the primes. For example, if you multiply two prime numbers, 11,587 and 12,241, a computer program will generate 141,836,467 in less than a millisecond. However, a computer program that factors the two primes that made up that number would take around 6000 milliseconds. Now imagine using 64 digit numbers instead of the five decimal numbers used in the previous example. You can't; that's why cryptology works both for securing your banking data and for mining bitcoin.
For a single hash, the chances of finding the winning value are one in a trillion. If you're working alone, your odds are not great, even if you have a powerful mining setup. Unless you have a high-performance computer, mining a bitcoin can take 30 days. You can also spend up to $75k to mine one bitcoin. Creating these levels of computing cycles also requires a lot of electricity.
Former 33-year-old ex-Amazon employee Paige Thompson took a shortcut when she decided to get into Bitcoin mining. Instead of buying expensive computer equipment, she used someone else's high-performance machines. She hacked Capital One's network in 2019 to use their powerful computer systems. This is called cryptojacking. Hackers infiltrate a large corporation's network to find underused high-powered computers. Being an ex-Amazon employee, she knew a few tricks that allowed her to take advantage of Capital One's Amazon cloud system. In a real-life Scooby-Doo ending, she would have gotten away with it, but for those meddling kids. Those kids were white hat hackers who infiltrated her system and discovered what she was doing.
