Education Ministry’s website, victim of cyber attacks twice in the past two months

The official website of the National Education Ministry has been subject to two cyber attacks in the past two months, the institution’s representatives have announced on Friday, while probing into the second attack, which seems to be related to a bitcoin hack.

„The Education Ministry has been the target to cyber attacks twice in the past two months. We are currently working to remedy the problems,” the ministry’s spokesperson, Catalina Toma, said.

Romanian National Computer Security Incident Response Team (CERT-RO) confirmed that the second cyber attack is related to an intended miner bitcoin script, which means that any person using the website, even for several minutes, generates cryptocurrencies for the one who has illegally uploaded the programme.

„The first conclusions are indeed that the website of the Education Ministry, www.edu.ro, has been compromised, either by someone from inside, who had uploaded a miner bitcoin script on purpose, or from outside,” CERT-RO head of the IT security and monitoring department told Hotnews.ro., adding that the script has not been yet removed.

The CERT-RO official says that the ministry’s experts are working to remove the script, yet warning that even if in theory the script is deleted, the website can be still vulnerable and can be re-infected in several hours.