Apple M1 Mac is targeted by miners! A master successfully cracked Apple M1 Mac mining and open sourced it on GitHub

Author | Liu Lin

Unexpectedly, miners have set their sights on Apple's M1 Mac.

Recently, according to foreign media reports, a great person cracked Apple's M1 Mac and successfully mined. Not only that, this great person also open-sourced this method on Github.

In response to this, some netizens expressed their admiration, while others said it was not worth it.

So, how does this great guy use M1 Mac to mine?

According to the description on Github, this great guy is named Yifan Gu (Gu Yifan), a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, and is also one of the contributors to the Arctic code base.

In his personal blog, he details how he mines.

But before we begin, Leiphone.com believes it is necessary to first explain to you what Ethereum mining is.

Ethereum mining is the way to obtain Ethereum through calculations on mining machines.

Similar to Bitcoin, Ethereum mining also uses mining machines, and is essentially still a competition of computing power.

Bitcoin (BTC) mining is a "proof of work" mechanism, with a block interval of about 10 minutes. Miners compete to cryptographically package transactions into blocks to obtain corresponding mining rewards, which will then be added to the Bitcoin blockchain. Miners package transactions through a special mathematical equation called a hash. The data or "input" processed by the hash function is essentially a cryptographically processed "summary". The key point of this "summary" is that it is easy to create, but it is almost impossible to decrypt it without the key.

Ethereum (ETH) is ASIC-resistant, with a time interval of about 13 seconds between each block. Vitalik Buterin originally invented the blockchain technology based on smart contracts and created and used his own algorithm, "ethash". ETH mines based on memory rather than computing power. Compared with ASIC equipment, the cost of running such algorithms is much lower.

Most of the Ethereum mining equipment is graphics card mining machines, and very few use professional ASIC mining machines.

Now, let’s go back to this great guy using M1 Mac for mining.

According to the description in his blog, using Ethereum to mine Apple M1 is not cost-effective and the performance is average.

According to Gu Yifan's evaluation, the efficiency of mining Ethereum is only 2MH/s, and the power consumption is 17-20W, which is far from that of NVIDIA graphics cards. The average daily income is only US$0.14 (less than RMB 1).

And, it’s important to note that this isn’t the first to attempt mining using the M1 CPU.

Last December, XMRig developers used M1 Mac to mine Monero.

In addition, there are reports that Apple plans to fully deploy Apple Silicon in its Mac product line in the future. It is said that there will be a 32-core ARM CPU and a 128-core GPU to replace AMD graphics cards.

As graphics card performance improves, I'm afraid mining performance will also be greatly improved.

At the same time, for Apple's M1 Mac, in addition to the possibility of being targeted by miners, it also faces more challenges: Bluetooth failure, Magic Trackpad disconnection, sudden crash and restart, security vulnerabilities or black screen problems, etc.

Recently, M1 Mac has been plagued by problems.

According to foreign media MacRumors, Apple recently acknowledged that some M1 Mac Minis have a problem with "pink squares or pixels" after connecting to a monitor. Since the release of the M1 Mac mini in November last year, many users have reported this problem in Apple support communities and forums such as Reddit.

According to feedback from affected users, the "pink square" problem seems to only occur on monitors connected via HDMI. Monitors connected using USB-C or Thunderbolt currently do not have this problem.

Last Monday, Apple's M1 Mac was revealed to have been attacked by two malware strains.

Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle discovered GoSearch22, which may be the first malware written for M1, while investigating Safari adware extensions. It is also a member of the family of the notorious Pirrit adware.

GoSearch22 follows the characteristics of Pirrit, disguised as a legitimate Safari browser extension, collecting user data and serving illegal ads and pop-ups to users, and is very good at evading detection. The antivirus software of the X86 version of Mac can easily identify the Gosearch22 malware, but it can escape the eyes of the M1 Mac security system.

Currently, Apple has revoked the developer certificate of GoSearch22, and the malware can no longer run.

But the good times didn't last long, as security researchers soon discovered another malware attack.

According to foreign media ArsTechnica, after recompiling macOS adware to target Apple's new internal processor, security agencies Malwarebytes and Red Canary discovered that nearly 30,000 Mac computers worldwide were implanted with the malware Silver Sparrow. Currently, the infected Macs are mainly concentrated in the United States, Canada, France and the United Kingdom.

The malware has never been discovered before and has two versions of binaries: one for Macs with Intel x86_64 chips, and one for Macs with Apple's self-developed M1 chip.

Currently, Silver Sparrow is still in a "dormant" state and has not yet had any impact on computers and users.

According to security researchers, infected Mac computers check the control server every hour to see if the malware needs to run new commands or execute binaries. But so far, researchers have not found a payload, which means Silver Sparrow's ultimate goal is still unknown.

M1 Mac 问世仅仅三个月，安全问题频频出现，对于一向以安全性著称的苹果来说，需要给果粉们一个交代了，更需要重新审视 M1 Mac 的性能以及安全性问题了。

After all, the future of M1 Mac still has a long way to go.

References:

• https://www.huxiu.com/article/409635.html

• https://github.com/gyf304/ethminer-m1

• https://blog.yifangu.com/2021/02/26/mining-ethereum-on-a-m1-mac-gpu/

• https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-chip-mining-ethereu

• https://blog.yifangu.com/

• https://www.leiphone.com/news/202102/cBmk1oVYPNeT6PS7.html

This article is originally written by Leifeng.com, author : Liu Lin. Please reply "reprint" to apply for authorization. Reprinting without authorization is prohibited .