Several U.K. government websites and thousands more globally were hijacked by code which made visitors’ computers run cryptocurrency mining software.

The government websites affected include The Commissioner’s Office, The Student Loans Company, the Financial Ombudsman Service, and many more.

Security researchers traced the issue to BrowseAloud software that makes it easier for blind and partially sighted people to use the internet. The cybercriminals compromised the software by adding a crypto jacking script to it.

Resulting in everyone who visited websites that ran BrowseAloud to secretly have their computer’s processing power used to earn money for cybercriminals, by mining the cryptocurrency known as “Monero”.

Texthelp, the company behind the BrowseAloud plugin says the service was temporarily taken down and resumed service as of midday Tuesday. The company also say that the exploit “was active for a period of four hours on Sunday” and no customer data was stolen or lost as a result of the hack.

Cryptocurrency hacks such as these are becoming increasingly common since bitcoin’s significant price rise in 2017. The trend is also likely to continue as every successful attack earn a large amount of money for these criminals.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has confirmed the attack and that their technical experts are examining the data involving these incidents of malware being used to illegally mine cryptocurrency.

Having trusted security software installed on your machine is essential and will help identify and warn against affected websites. If you would like to discuss our Security services, please be in touch at — [email protected].