Early on the morning of February 11, 2018, while sysadmins asleep at the end of the night shift, an unknown team of hackers has cracked the code of the plugin “Browsealoud”. They finished there little-known miner of cryptocurrencies and walked away, carefully making sure notice. Only by noon that day the team responsible for the support of Browsealoud, sort out the situation after the barrage of calls and disabled the plugin for subsequent cleaning. But it was too late.
The feature of this short but effective attack was that the Browsealoud plug-in designed to provide access to information for the blind and visually impaired people. But he operated mainly where the US authorities are obliged to ensure such access to its citizens – on the websites of the national agencies. All were affected about 4,200 different pages that cast a shadow on the entire us government machine.
Hackers did not steal anything, have settled malicious viruses, does not harm end-users. People just went to the sites that are considered a priori protected and that they vitally need in their professional and personal activities, and on their computers run a script miner. How many hackers managed to “earn” this way is unknown, but the concern is not that.
The Internet has exposed new Achilles heel, the plugins like Browsealoud uses a variety of sites, which administrators by default, trust their developers and not reinsured. And they can’t respond to all the threats in the world and if the hackers once again quietly breaking a few plugins or drivers, you will be able to suddenly attack millions of websites. As shown by mining the alleged sirsasana government portals of the United States, to make it much easier than it seems.
Source — The Guardian