An unidentified hacker has approximately stolen $20 million worth of cryptocurrency affecting Verge, Monacoin, and Bitcoin Gold.

Recently, 388, 000 coins from Bitcoin Gold got hacked. The company said it’s worth $17.5 million and confirmed that the hacker gained control of the hash rate of the network to reverse transactions and reorganize the blockchain.

According to reports, the attacker made deposits at a wide variety of cryptocurrencies, traded the coins for other currencies, and then withdrew the funds.

In order to cover their tracks, the coin miners utilized overwhelming computer power to force the network to accept any falsified coins and cause the entire funds to disappear from the company’s exchange-controlled wallets.

The technique used by the miners is commonly known as a 51 per cent attack where a hacker gains control of the total computing power of a specific network.

Because of that, the attacker was able to reverse the transaction, spending similar coins twice and undermining the nature of blockchain.

The attack stroked the whole point of cryptocurrencies when it comes to authenticity as well as transparency. As a result, tracking all of the transactions became tougher than expected.

A report from Symantec indicated the rise of bitcoin mining and cryptojacking by hackers who steal highly important computer resources to successfully mine for possible crypto gold.

The 23rd report of the Symantec threat report showed that in 2017, detections of coin mining rose up to 44,000pc throughout the United Kingdom. It was considered the fifth-highest number of detections throughout the globe.

Due to a low barrier of entry, cybercriminals are able to harness cloud CPU usage and stolen processing power from different enterprises and consumers to mine cryptocurrency. A low barrier of entry only requires some lines of code for the successful and effective operation.

At present, coin miners have the ability to slow devices, overheat batteries, and make computers unusable in just a snap. For enterprises and other organizations, coin miners are able to put corporate networks at high risk of shutdown, additional cost, inflate cloud CPU usage, and a lot more.

Symantec CTO and EMEA VP Darren Thomson said that the attackers could co-opt phone, IoT device, or computer to employ them for profit. He also added that people have to expand their defenses as early as possible to avoid paying the price for someone else employing their device.