Hackers infect thousands of websites to mine cryptocurrencies

British security researcher Scott Helme discovered a handful of government websites in the US, UK and Australia had been recently compromised by malware aiming to take control of visitors' computers to mine cryptocurrency.

Unlike traditional attacks, these infections do not contain "ransomware" or steal data, but operate in stealth mode to make profits from the shadowy world of cryptocurrencies.

The malware leveraged the victims' devices to generate the cryptocurrency Monero by performing complex, CPU-intensive calculations, a mathematical process known as "mining" that's used to create some cryptocurrencies.

According to Helme's analysis, at least 4,275 websites were running the Browsealoud script at the time the crypto-currency mining attack was occurring. Among the sites that were impacted were U.S. websites including uscourts.gov, multiple United Kingdom government sites including the British National Health Service (NHS), and government sites in Sweden and Australia.

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