He later added that an Australian local government site that was using the software had been hacked as well. With threat operators hacking a single organisation, thousands of websites had been impacted in the UK, the United States and Ireland. The associate commented to Helme that while the attack type was not new, it was the largest instance of it being deployed he had ever seen. Scott Helme, a security researcher, was informed of the cyber strike by an associate who sent him over antivirus software alerts, he had received after accessing a website run by the UK Government. The hack involved the code running discreetly in the background, up until the point a webpage was closed. Coinhive is a program that is advertised by the slogan “A Crypto Miner for your Website”. Malevolent code for specific software called Coinhive was used in the widespread attack. Across the Atlantic, the homepage for the United States Courts was also hijacked by the threat operators. Here in the UK, users who loaded up the official government websites for the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the Student Loans Company (SLC), along with the local council sites for Croydon, Camden and Manchester City, had their devices’ processing power exploited by hackers. Over 5,000 websites were hacked in order to force site visitors’ devices to run malicious software that mined a cryptocurrency called Monero, which is similar in nature to the popular Bitcoin. Thousands of websites infected across the globe In the next sections, we’ll explore this global event, taking a closer look at how it occurred and what the effects were.

In recent years, cyberattacks on world governments have been rife, and here in the United Kingdom, local authorities have also suffered assaults on their systems.īack in 2018, UK government agencies and local councils made the headlines when their dedicated websites were knocked offline in a hack that impacted thousands of sites around the world.

Impact hacked client official website