Finance notices a sharp rise in compute spend on idle project accounts; investigation finds abandoned instances mining cryptocurrency after a compromised API key. What cloud-typical abuse does this illustrate?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Idle boxes suddenly burning cash on ‘work’ nobody ordered usually means cryptojacking. Compromised keys plus forgotten instances are a municipal classic—the city’s wallet pays while someone else’s miner runs. Kill the zombies, rotate keys, and watch spend anomalies.
Full Explanation
Cryptojacking abuses cloud compute to mine cryptocurrency for an attacker, often on neglected or weakly governed instances. Abandoned workloads with leaked credentials are frequent hosts because they attract little operational attention until invoices spike. Cost anomaly detection, instance inventory hygiene, and credential rotation are practical cloud defenses.