MUMBAI: India suffered the first big 'cryptojacking' attack last month. The target was the Aditya Birla Group — one of the country’s largest business conglomerates headquartered in Mumbai.
More than 2,000 computers of various companies of the group were targeted by hackers for cryptojacking — a new kind of cyber-warfare where hackers misuse a target’s terminals and their processing power to mine crypto currency.
The attack was first detected about a month ago at a group's overseas subsidiary. Within days the malware found its way into some of the manufacturing and other services companies belonging to the business house. “It’s a kind of attack where the primary intention of the hackers is not to steal information and cause business disruption. Rather, they hijack the target’s computers and tap the power supply to the organisation to mine crypto coins,” a person aware of the attack told ET.
The hackers are however understood to have transferred the newly mined Monero coins to digital wallets, the report adds.
Recently, in a mass cryptojacking campaign, over 300 websites using the Drupal content management system have been infected with cryptocurrency-mining malware.
Security researcher, Troy Mursch who is the brain behind the website Bad Packets Report, uncovered the malicious campaign involving the repeat offender Coinhive on Saturday. He said that many of the discovered websites were government and university sites from all over the world
