Antena 3, or rather the website of the famous television station, had serious problems yesterday, after it was discovered that the people visiting it were helping to mine Monero, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. Everything was discovered by some users who noticed that the processors of their computers were working at maximum power when the Antena 3 website was accessed.
Antena 3 had the LIVE section infected, where a live feed of the television station is transmitted, this being one of the most accessed pages on a daily basis, so its choice was not accidental. Practically, when the user accesses the respective page on the Antena 3 website, his browser also loads the Monero mining script and generates money for those who put it on the respective page.
The script used on the Antena 3 website is called Coinhive, and according to the tests carried out by some of the users, the level of use of the processor increased up to 10 times, a computer function, when the Antena 3 page was accessed. Official , those from Antena 3 said that their website was hacked by hackers, who injected the respective script into the page, and it was cleaned a few hours after the notification.
Antena 3 visitors mined Monero, a type of Bitcoin
Monero is not as used as Bitcoin, but it is a quite popular cryptocurrency, but its choice over Bitcoin is only held by those who infected the Athena 3 page last night to generate money. Theoretically, the Antena 3 website was infected last night for several hours, but it is not known in reality how long the respective script was accessible on the television station's website page.
"For several hours, the site was used by the perpetrators of the attack to make money from cryptocurrencies (Monero) by exploiting the users' processors almost to the maximum. We apologize to the users of the LIVE page for the inconvenience caused and assure everyone that there was neither intention nor any exploitation error on the part of Antena3 or the people directly associated with Antena3."
Antena 3 is one of the most visited websites in Romania, the respective page attracting extremely high interest among Romanians who want to constantly find out the most important news. The script was running when Antena 3 was broadcasting an interview with the Prime Minister of Romania, Mihai Tudose, so there was a large enough audience to generate cryptocurrencies for those who installed the script.
Antena 3 seems to be the first important website in Romania to be attacked in such a way by hackers, if this is the reality, but we can expect other important websites to go through similar problems. At the moment, the Antena 3 website has been cleaned of the script that generates the respective problems, so everything should be normal.
