“Monero Coins Mined without our Consent”, says OnlineKhabar

Following the reports on social media about Monero cryptocurrency mining being done on the OnlineKhabar website, OnlineKhabar’s editor in chief, Dharma Raj Bhusal, posted a statement on its official Facebook page addressing the issue.

Sachin Petrucci Thakuri, Security Engineer at ThreatNix, published a post on his Facebook wall on Tuesday claiming that OnlineKhabar was mining Monero, a cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin, through its website using its readers’ computer resources. He put up screenshots and videos of the site using a Coinhive script to mine Monero.

In response to this, Bhusal first denied that such a script had been used its website. And later on yesterday evening, he released a statement on data security. According to the statement, the team at OnlineKhabar started checking its website as soon as they received complaints about the mining. Initially, they found no such script on their servers. However, more investigation revealed that such a Coinhive script was indeed used in their recent archive. The script was then removed on Tuesday evening.

According to OnlineKhabar, this was done without their knowledge and authority and currently, they are working to find out how this incident happened. For this purpose, they have already requested the Central Investigation Bureau of Nepal Police to look into the issue.

The statement says, “OnlineKhabar.com values love and trust our readers have shown to us and we will not tolerate any criminal activity through our website. We demand that the state authorities identify and book elements involved in accessing our server without any authority and cheating our readers.”

It adds, “OnlineKhabar apologizes to our readers for the inconvenience caused due to our security negligence. We express our sincere commitments to exercise caution for data security in the future.”