The attack against the Transparency system lasted only a few hours. The cryptocurrency that the attackers were mining at that time remains unknown.
The Mexican Transparency system became a victim of a hack to mine cryptocurrencies with its resources. The National Institute of Transparency reported the news.
The INAI explained in a brief statement posted on its Twitter account that the National Transparency Platform presented failures due to a cryptocurrency exploitation hacking attack.
A few hours later, on the same Monday, the INAI expressed the solution of the situation in a new statement. The institution said it was working to achieve new measures in cybersecurity that would allow them to avoid more attacks and guarantee optimal behavior of its systems.
According to the information expressed on its website, the INAI is the entity in charge of guaranteeing the fulfillment of two fundamental rights: the right to access public information and the right to have personal data protection in Mexico.
There are no clues about the specific cryptocurrency the attackers were mining with the INAI and its computing resources. But the attack lasted for at least five hours.
Cryptojacking is a Common Attack
The type of attack used against the INAI seems to be cryptojacking. This type of hacking consists of a virus that uses the processing resources of the infected computers to mine cryptocurrencies whose algorithm allows mining through other computers. Monero is one of the most used currencies in these attacks.
The criminals use Monero because it is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that makes it much more difficult to track. It allows criminals to achieve their goals without almost any obstacle.
This kind of attack was typical a few years ago, with cases such as the hacking of government portals in India or the infection of more than 1 million computers in China in a couple of years.
This scheme got discovered when the security team of the company Tencent Holdings Limited alerted the Public Security authorities about a “Trojan” type mining script hidden in free download add-ons.
The Hackers developed and embedded the malware in these add-ons, which they offered through advertisements that promised benefits to users, such as improving browsing speed. The infected files reached at least 5 million computers in China.
Many companies, personalities, and a vast number of users had become a victim of Cryptojacking. Cryptojacking has even reached app platforms like games on Steam or the electric car company, Tesla. Although these attacks seemed to have vanished some time ago, this technique has remained on the radar of cybersecurity and technology companies.
Microsoft and Intel joined forces to fight against this malicious cryptocurrency mining. The software house revealed that its enterprise Defender for Endpoint program now brings assistance to the microprocessor and its manufacturing technology to track and detect this type of malware.
According to a statement released by Microsoft, the solution focuses on machine learning and microprocessor telemetry. The tool recognizes the execution of the malicious program through a performance profile.
By: Jenson Nuñez
