Posted by jakelsaunders94 12/17/2025
But I am interested in the monero aspect here.
Should I treat this as some datapoint on monero’s security having held up well so far?
No. The reason attackers mine Monero and not some other cryptocurrency isn't the anonymity. Most cryptocurrencies aren't (meaningfully) mineable with CPUs, Monero (apparently) is. There may be others, but I suspect that they either deliver less $ per CPU-second (due to not being valuable), or are sufficiently unknown and/or painful to set up that the attackers just go with the known default.
Trying to mine Bitcoin directly would be pointless, you'd get no money because you're competing with ASIC miners. Some coins were designed to be ASIC resistant, these are mostly mined on GPUs. Monero (and some other coins) were designed to also be GPU resistant (I think). You could see it as a sign that that property has held up (well enough), but nothing else.
If you used the server to mine Bitcoin, you would make approximately zero (0) profit, even if somebody else pays for the server.
But also yes, Monero has technically held up very well.
The attack did not and could not compromise or weaken moneros privacy and anonymity features.
This became enough of a hassle that I stopped using them.
lol.
But yeah it is massively overspecced. Makes me feel cool load testing my go backend at 8000 requests per second though!
But if they do have a vulnerability and manage to escape the sandbox then they will be root on your host.
Running your processes as an unprivileged user inside your containers reduces the possibility of escaping the sandbox, running your containers themselves as un unprivileged user (rootless podman or docker for example) reduces the attack surface when they manage to escape the sandbox.
They have done it to others.
And isn’t it a design flaw if you can see all processes from inside a container? This could provide useful information for escaping it.
Deliberate heat generation.
If it's cold and you're going to be running a heater anyways, then if your heat is resistive, then running a cryptominer is just as efficient and returns a couple dollars back to you. It effectively becomes "free" relative to running the heater.
If you use a heat pump, or you rely on burning something (natural gas, wood, whatever) to generate heat, then the math changes.
I used a rack of GPUs to heat my house for a few years back when gpu mining was decently profitable, and my electricity bill was 3-4x more than with the heat pump - so you have to keep a close eye on the math when you're running at/under profitability.
> RandomX utilizes a virtual machine that executes programs in a special instruction set that consists of integer math, floating point math and branches. > These programs can be translated into the CPU's native machine code on the fly (example: program.asm). > At the end, the outputs of the executed programs are consolidated into a 256-bit result using a cryptographic hashing function (Blake2b).
I doubt that you anyone managed to create an ASIC that does this more efficiently and cost effective than a basic CPU. So, no, probably no one is mining Monero using an ASIC.
If they can enslave 100s or even 1000s of machine mining XMR for them, easy money if you set aside the legality of it.
Docker will overwrite your rules when you publish ports.
Do not publish ports with docker. Do not run internal services on the publicly accessible system.