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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday February 13 2018, @12:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the plosives-galore dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Thousands of websites around the world – from the UK's NHS and ICO to the US government's court system – were today secretly mining crypto-coins on netizens' web browsers for miscreants unknown.

The affected sites all use a fairly popular plugin called Browsealoud, made by Brit biz Texthelp, which reads out webpages for blind or partially sighted people.

This technology was compromised in some way – either by hackers or rogue insiders altering Browsealoud's source code – to silently inject Coinhive's Monero miner into every webpage offering Browsealoud.

For several hours today, anyone who visited a site that embedded Browsealoud inadvertently ran this hidden mining code on their computer, generating money for the miscreants behind the caper.

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/11/browsealoud_compromised_coinhive/


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @04:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14 2018, @04:25AM (#637455)

    Considering the computing power required to mine crypto currency, and the challenges of distributed processing, how much money did these people possibly make? Has anyone tried to analyze that part of it? I suspect it wasn’t much and probably not worth the risk/effort.

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