UK NCSC confirms mining virus attack on government websites, Australia also affected

The threat of mining viruses, previously described mostly by private cyber security websites and cryptocurrency-related websites, is now becoming a target of research conducted by the United Kingdom National Cyber Security Centre. This has been directly confirmed on its official website. The site also tells that the threat has already been disabled.

The statement comes amidst the unprecedented attack of mining viruses at the governmental websites of Great Britain, which has stirred up a hornets’ nest.

As highlighted by the British media, the vulnerability of BrowseAloud, a special 3rd-party plugin for people with visual impairment to read a certain website, was used. Australian observers report about similar attacks on their websites, this information has already been confirmed by the major media outlets as well.

Not unlike the previous mining malware attacks described on Bitnewstoday, a Coinhive mechanism has been used. It is very popular among hackers for establishing beneficial remote mining - a visitor of the injected website is unknowingly using computational resources and they are getting the money in the form of Monero, an altcoin with measures efficient enough for hackers to hide tracks.