China’s Qihoo 360 Built Crypto Mining Monitoring Software to Support Crackdown

Chinese cybersecurity giant Qihoo 360 said in a WeChat post on Tuesday that it has built a system to monitor crypto mining operations that will assist the government’s crackdown on the industry.

• The monitoring system is aimed at government agencies and companies that want to comply with China’s latest crackdown on crypto mining. The software can provide miners’ internet protocol (IP) address, geographical location, network type and connection frequency, and suggest methods of how to dispose of them, Qihoo 360 said.

• Last week, Chinese users couldn’t connect to some of the world’s largest mining pools because of “DNS (domain name system) poisoning.” That type of attack means that the pool’s domain names – for example, CoinDesk.com –were directed away from their actual IP addresses, where their servers are.

• Qihoo 360 found that 109,000 mining IP addresses were active daily on average in November, mostly in the provinces of Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shandong, the company said. Miners mainly use home broadband, enterprise-dedicated internet connections and data centers, Qihoo 360 said.

• The software uses the company’s proprietary network traffic monitoring capabilities, big data analysis and active defense mechanisms.

Read more: Multiple Mining Pools Are Facing Connectivity Issues