Indian Government Websites Hacked For Unauthorized Crypto Mining
With India increasing its restriction in relation to anything that has to do with blockchain and cryptocurrency, it is quite ironic that more than 100 websites belonging to the Indian government are being exploited for unauthorized crypto mining purposes (crypto jacking).
119 Indian Government Websites Hacked
Based on a recent report, India is fast becoming the number one base of crypto jackers. A report showing that over 119 India Government websites got infected with malware which allows for illegal crypto mining to be done has surfaced.
A recent analysis which was done by some security experts gives some examples of Indian government website affected so far. The director of municipal administration of Andhra Pradesh, Tirupati Municipal Corporation and Macherla municipality websites were included on the list of affected website.
The minister of State for Electronics and IT, K.J. Alphons, also confirmed that a total of 22,207 Indian websites were attacked by crypto jackers in the space of nine months (Apr 2017 – Jan 2018). Of these 22,207 websites, 493 were used for malware propagation.
Cryptojacking
Cryptojacking has become a popular trend in recent times. The process usually involves the use of malware to initiate an unauthorized mining of cryptocurrency. The Malware is usually being loaded on the victim’s website or computer using a JavaScript code. Once this is done, the crypto jackers can proceed to make use of the website visitor’s computing power for mining purposes.
This is of course done in a stealthy manner without the users suspecting.
Why are they After Government Websites?
Since the Government websites are highly visited, this gives the hacker more computing power to perform their operations. Also since these websites are trusted to some extent by the users. Therefore chances of them making use of an anti-virus or anti-malware are greatly reduced. These factors make government website the perfect gold mine for crypto jackers.
So far the Government has not been able to estimate the amount of money these hackers might have made through this process.
