Indian government websites in Andhra Pradesh are facing a hacking problem as incidents of stealing processing power to mine digital currencies recently came to light. As per the report, the hackers attacked citizen portals of Andhra Pradesh Municipal Corporation, Macheria Municipality, and Tirupati Municipal Corporation.

Hackers use malicious links, JavaScript code to trap victims

Cryptojacking malware such as Coinhive have infected more than a hundred such Indian websites as of now. The malware allows the hackers easy access to the computers of victims. The sole purpose of the hackers is to mine virtual currencies using the processing power of these computers. Hackers fool the users by encouraging the victims to click on malicious links attached to their emails. Another way is to infect the website using JavaScript code. The hackers load the code on the browser of the victim.

Once hackers manage to trap the victim, the users inadvertently start mining digital currencies albeit for the hackers as they have placed scripts in the sites originally. Called cryptojacking, this entire process completely hijacks the computers of users for mining cryptocurrencies.

Malware continues to be a part of AP’s public portals

Apart from Andhra Pradesh, the hackers have also attacked many other government websites in this way to generate high traffic volume. According to the security researcher, Indrajeet Bhuyan, “Hackers target government websites for mining cryptocurrency because those websites get high traffic and most people trust them. Earlier, we saw a lot of government websites getting defaced. Now, injecting crypto-jackers is more fashionable as the hacker can make money.”

However, the response from the government to this revelation is highly discouraging. In response to this news, the IT advisor to the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, JA Chowdhary simply thanked the media for notifying them. As of now the government of AP has not taken any concrete steps towards fixing the issue.

It means the malicious malware code is still running on the public portal of the state. Reports indicate that apart from government websites, the cyber-criminals are also attacking enterprise systems with high traffic volume to mine virtual currencies secretly.