Arstechnica – It took just one day for a low-end, Internet-connected digital video recorder to become infected with malware that surreptitiously mined Bitcoins on behalf of the quick-moving attackers.
The feat, documented in a blog post published Monday by researchers at the security-training outfit Sans Institute, was all the more impressive because the DVR contained no interface for downloading software from the Internet. The lack of a Wget, ftp, or kermit application posed little challenge for the attackers. To work around the limitation, the miscreants used a series of Unix commands that effectively uploaded and executed a Wget package and then used it to retrieve the Bitcoin miner from an Internet-connected server.