Cybersecurity firm’s Qihoo 360 new software tracks block reward mining activities in China

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

China has been cracking down on block reward miners this year, pushing most of them out from a country that has dominated the industry since 2013. Qihoo 360, a Chinese software giant, is seeking to make it even easier to eradicate mining activities, developing software that can detect mining activities and allow enterprises and state agencies to eradicate it from their systems.

Qihoo, which is established in Internet security and antivirus software, announced in a WeChat post that its software program is intended for businesses and parastatals that seek to enforce the government’s ban on digital currency block reward mining.

Through the program, Qihoo can detect the miner’s IP address, connection frequency, network type and geographical location. It can even suggest ways to get rid of the miners from an enterprise’s system.

The software program “can conduct comprehensive analysis of large network asset mapping and mining threat intelligence, so as to obtain network-wide mining host data,” Qihoo, which is based in the capital Beijing, stated.

According to its preliminary data, in November, there were 109,000 active block reward mining IPs per day in China.

“The main network types used are home broadband, corporate dedicated lines, and data centers, mainly in Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. Province, Shandong Province and other places,” it added.

China’s crackdown has forced many miners to flee to other countries, including Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and even the U.S., which has now become the world’s largest mining hub. Local governments have been enforcing the crackdown, in some provinces requiring the power grid operators to investigate the presence of any miners.

However, this hasn’t been enough for Xi Jinping’s government, which has now turned to the state agencies. As CoinGeek reported two weeks ago, China’s National Development and Reform Commission fired a warning to officials in the government whom it claimed have been taking advantage of their positions in government to mine digital currencies.

Watch: CoinGeek New York panel, How to Achieve Green Bitcoin: Energy Consumption & Environmental Sustainability