Miner web detected in government portal of Mexico

Recently social network users pointed out that the page of the National Registry of Professionals of the Government of Mexico was generating a high consumption of the capacity of their CPUs.

When reviewing the source code of the web portal, it was possible to observe the presence of a Monero web miner, known as CoinHive. Currently it has been removed from the page. However, there is evidence that he was there.

A search engine for websites that mine cryptocurrencies also confirmed this. New queries to the site indicate that the miner on the government page is no longer active.

The portal that owned the web miner, works as a portal to consult the professional titles of its citizens who have registered. In it, anyone can verify the validity of professional titles with patent effects.

Because it is a public consultation portal of a government, it has a high visitor traffic. According to SimilarWeb, last December of 2017 it presented more than 219,000 visits with a duration of more than 2 minutes each. Assuming that each machine generates about 15 hash / second of mining power, for the past month it would have collected about 0.028 moneros (XMR), which at the current rate according to CoinMarketCap, equals approximately $ 9 dollars.

It is not known if the insertion of the web miner was intentional or by an unauthorized third party. Most likely it was without authorization from the administrators of the web, because it does not warn users about this feature and it has become a common practice that has affected pages from different countries and even from large corporations such as Movistar Spain.

These miners are also infiltrating advertisements. In addition, a company recently detected that a North Korean university was receiving monero funds that were produced by an application designed to connect and be executed between several networks.

Although this type of cryptocurrency mining is a controversial practice and has generally been classified as malware, it can be used for charitable purposes such as helping to free slaves in Pakistan or to finance prosthetics in Argentina. In cases like these, users of the web are informed in a timely manner.