If you have invested in the cryptocurrencies or know of someone who has some capital invested in the digital coins, you will find them a little on edge these days. The cryptocurrencies were on the rise for few months and reached record prices but slumped recently.
That has led to some people moving away from the cryptocurrencies but there are still a lot of people who believe that the future lies in cryptocurrencies and among these people are a lot of hackers. Mining takes a lot of computing power and in order to stay ahead of other miners, hackers are hijacking thousands of websites including reputable entities like the UK’s National Health Service and the US court system to mine the digital coins.
All these websites use a plug-in called Browsealoud which allow blind or people with sight issues to listen to the text that appears on the screen. The hackers used accessibility software to exploit this and hijack the websites. A couple of days ago, malware intended to mine the cryptocurrency monero was added to Browsealoud’s code and it ran for several hours on 4,200 infected websites.
Whenever a visitor accessed the website, the mining script would run in their web browser and without their consent generated cryptocurrency for the hackers. The team realized the issue by the afternoon of the morning the malware was inserted and was able to repair the code by shutting down the service for a while.
The authorities don’t know who the hackers are yet but they made it clear that their actions were illegal. The breach has a bigger meaning. It is bad news for all the sites and reveals the weakness of the modern internet as a whole. Almost half the websites that use cookies to track user activities use the same software and if the hackers can crack the one common software, they can gain access to millions of sites relying upon it.
The websites cannot do much to control these breaches and even though the consumers were not affected by the theft of any information, who is to say that it might not happen in the future. The craze for cryptocurrencies is not stopping anytime soon and in turn, the hackers will only get more creative.
You can watch the video below to learn how bitcoin mining works:
