Two Russians charged with using virus to mine on state-owned computers

Two Russian nationals have been charged for allegedly mining cryptocurrency on computer systems owned by the Russian government, state news agency TASS reported on Monday.
TASS quoted Nikolay Murashov, deputy director of the National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents, as saying: "In Russia, two cases of using state organizations' computers to mine cryptocurrencies occurred recently, and the suspects were held criminally responsible."
According to the report, one of the nationals was from the Kurgan region and used a botnet attack program to form a one-to-many control botnet covering almost the entire country. Another was criminally prosecuted for using the JSC Rostovvodokanal website for "mining." The report did not provide other details, but it is understood that the attackers hacked into the web pages and mined cryptocurrencies when people viewed the pages with their browsers.
According to Murasov, since the virus uses up to 80% of a computer’s free power for mining, the average user may not even be aware of it.
It is worth mentioning that in October, three nuclear scientists were convicted and sentenced for illegally mining Bitcoin at the Sarov laboratory, where the former Soviet Union developed its first nuclear bomb. In 2017, President Vladimir Putin's chief technology adviser estimated that 20% to 30% of devices were "infected" with crypto mining viruses. But some Russian cybersecurity experts and government officials said the number was fake. (IT Home)