A website belonging to a County government in Russia was hacked to mine Cryptocurrency

A website belonging to a Russian County government Khabarovsk was hacked to mine digital currencies using the processing power of the website’s visitors. This was reported by Vyacheslav Kovalenko who the County IT admin officer is stating that all the people who visited the website since the end of May were redirected to a malicious site which had launched a mining software on the County’s computers.

Before the discovery, the malware had already operated for 10 days and was removed last Thursday. In addition to securing the computers from the malware officials from this county published a report requesting their users to block pop-up windows so that they can avoid similar threats in the future.

The hacked website is responsible for posting information about the county administration’s work and also upcoming events. The site may have been targeted because it has a visitorship of about 600 persons per day. This type of hacking has become very famous and is now been called cryptojacking. Many cased of cryptojacking have been reported most of which are associated with digital currency Moreno.

Cases of illegal mining have become very popular in Russia. In February a number of employees from the Russian Scientific Research Institute for Experimental physics were caught mining digital currencies at their workstation using the institute’s supercomputer. More to that two other IT managers were fired for using government computers to mine cryptocurrency and connecting the computers with mining hardware.

There was also another case in Russia where Transneft employees which is the biggest oil company in Russia were caught mining cryptocurrencies in the workplace. The cases have become many in Russia. These could be attributed to the fact that mining is the easiest way to get cryptocurrency without spending money. Since mining requires a lot of electric power people decide to use company equipment so that the power cost can go to the company.

Such cryptojacking cases are tarnishing the growing image of the digital currency market. The market has been linking to many illegal activities like money laundering and funding of illegal activities. This has led to several platform banning crypto related transactions and many governments deciding to regulate the market. Even though regulation cryptocurrency market may not be good for the immediate growth of the market it may prove to be very helpful in the long-term growth of the market.