If you're living in Egypt, you may unknowingly be mining cryptocurrency for the government.
A new report from researchers at the University of Toronto claims that the Egyptian government, or entities connected to it, have hijacked internet users' connections to secretly mine cryptocurrency.
Through a scheme dubbed AdHose, Egypt has been sending internet users to either advertising sites, or to defunct websites. When the users are sent to these site, their computers are being misused without their knowledge, often to mine the cryptocurrency Monero, according to the report.
“On a number of occasions, the middleboxes were apparently being used to hijack Egyptian internet users’ unencrypted web connections en masse, and redirect the users to revenue-generating content such as affiliate ads and browser cryptocurrency mining scripts,” the report said.
A recent scan by the researchers also suggests that the vast majority of Egyptian internet users have been affected. According to the data collected during a scan on Jan. 3, about 95 percent of observed devices were affected by AdHose. In total, the scan looked at more than 5,700 devices.
However, the researchers were actually initially doing the scans to study government censorship.The hardware used to implement AdHose also doubles up as a censorship tool. It is used to block news sites such as Al Jazeera, or those of rights groups such as Human Rights Watch.
Similar schemes were observed by the researchers in Turkey and Syria as well, although those were only for censorship purpose, not for mining cryptocurrency.
“In Egypt and Turkey, we also found that devices matching our Sandvine PacketLogic fingerprint were being used to block political, journalistic, and human rights content," the researchers said,> according to Market Watch.
A Canadian firm called Sandvine created the the intrusive hardware. According to Quartz, the firm referred to the report as “false, misleading, and wrong."
The researchers also said that despite the potential risks and harms with this powerful technology, the market "remains largely unregulated."
"Regardless of the specific business sector, all companies have a responsibility to prevent the misuse of their products and services in ways that undermine human rights," the report said.