A Microsft-powered advertising screen of a shop in London was spotted to be hijacked and was reported by Terence Eden’s blog. The advertising screen, instead of showing a commercial message from a global brand showed a Windows operating system with a window marked “NiceHash Miner Legacy”.
This is a bitcoin mining program that was designed for older computers. The display on the screen showed that it was mining with a hash-rate of zero. This means that there is a possibility that the person behind the hack was not getting anything to show for his efforts.
The author of the blog asked for “someone cleverer than me [to] figure out which wallet starts with 3Jgi6 and is receiving these coins.” There are other broken digital advertising displays showing Windows error messages but this is the first time an advertising screen has been associated with mining cryptocurrencies.
It is still unclear whether this was the work of an external party, breaching the security or if an employee of the shop decided to put the computers to good use over the weekend. “Or there’s no way to know if the advertising industry has decided that mining is more profitable than encouraging people to enjoy a cool refreshing glass of blue milk.” the blog post said.
With different countries banning the digital currencies and reports of them being used to launder money, we can only expect these kinds of reports to grow.
