A technology security firm found a crypto mining software that illegally used the computing power of those visiting the Make-A-Wish Foundation website.
During the season of giving, visitors of a non-profit organization had been giving away their computing power to mine cryptocurrencies without permission, a technology security group recently found.
Trustwave detected a cryptojacking malware on the official website of Make-A-Wish Foundation. This malicious software used the visitors’ units to illicitly mine cryptos, mostly coins on networks that can be mined competitively using only CPUs.
Make-A-Wish Foundation is an Arizona-based non-profit organization that grants the wish of selected children with serious illnesses or terminal diseases.
Meanwhile, Simon Kenin, a security researcher at Trustwave, explained that the mining software embedded on the website is called CoinIMP, a JavaScript miner built to mine privacy-focused crypto Monero (XMR), among others.
He added that a malicious third party, not the Make-A-Wish Foundation, added the illegal miner to the website.
Shortly after Trustwave unsuccessfully reached out to Make-A-Wish, the CoinIMP miner was removed from the website.
Cryptojacking has been prevalent in the past months after the entire crypto sector became more popular and more valuable. A study from the Cyber Threat Alliance released last September found that the number of illegal crypto miners found increased by 459 percent in between 2017 and 2018.
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