Ransomware Fraudsters Choose Monero Over Bitcoin

Ransomware fraudsters prefer Monero over Bitcoin because of its increased anonymity so now the victims of the hackers will have to pay with Monero as per the Sodinokibi Ransomware group announcements.

The ransomware fraudsters noted that combining the XMR coin with TOR will make the payments impossible to trace. The group is now accepting payments in Monero as the privacy payment method instead of Bitcoin and according to reports, the crew believes that choosing XMR coin will make it harder for law enforcement agencies to trace them. The operators reportedly posted the transition in a malware forum:

 “Due to CryptoNote and the obfuscation added to the protocol, passive mixing is provided: all transactions in the system are anonymous, and all participants in the system can use plausible denial in case of capture. The combination of an anonymous browser Tor and Monero can quite successfully make a person’s financial activity completely invisible to the police and government agencies. We are extremely worried about the anonymity and security of our adverts, so we began a “forced” transition from the BTC to Monero.”

The group will remove Bitcoin as a means of payment entirely and the future victims will have to learn more about how Monero operates as to how they can buy it and how to transfer it. John McAfee said that the criminals are already utilizing privacy coins which is great because they will be the first to use this ‘’valuable technology.’’ The crew behind the group initiated a malware system attack on new year’s eve on Travelex- a London-based company and the platform had to pay about $2.3 million in Bitcoin.

The ransomware operators will start infiltrating into organizations and will encrypt sensible information. They will request victims to pay the ransom via crypto in order to access the data and retrieve it. Europol conducted a webinar last year on these tactics between the open-source software and privacy coins and warned about the efficiency:

 “Since the suspect used a combination of TOR and privacy coins, we could not trace the funds. We could not trace the IP addresses. Which means, we hit the end of the road. Whatever happened on the Bitcoin blockchain was visible, and that’s why we were able to get reasonably far. But with Monero blockchain, that was the point where the investigation has ended. So this is a classic example of one of several cases we had where the suspect decided to move funds from Bitcoin or Ethereum to Monero.”