Governmental mining, redefined: Egypt authorities might exploit user resources to get coins

The government of Egypt might have less high moral standards than its neighbors. Messages coming from technological media tell about the new way of remote mining.

When users of Telecom Egypt visit certain websites, they are being redirected to a Monero-mining website instead. It’s based on Coinhive, a mechanism Bitnewstoday has described several times.

Canadian cyber security researchers who are the original source of this news also tell about the governments of Turkey and Syria using similar measures, although in cases with these countries, the threat is not related to cryptocurrency. But what unites these countries is the infection method - apparently, devices called Sandvine PacketLogic used for Internet connection contain security breaches someone used for malicious purposes. The installation of such devices has to be approved by the authorities who might have known about this threat all along.

This story indicates how technical progress never fails to stop. The authorities of Venezuela, it seems, are less tech-savvy: their police simply fabricates criminal cases and confiscates mining equipment to mine cryptocurrency afterwards. At least, this is what the source of Bitnewstoday in Venezuela told in an article regarding this matter.