The Egyptian government has been criticized in a report that claims they’re not just repressing and spying on the internet of their citizens, but they are also utilizing them to mine cryptocurrency.

The Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary facility at the University of Toronto wrote a report on March 3 strongly recommending that Egypt has been clandestinely mining cryptocurrency on the computers of its citizens. The report discussed that Procera/Sandvine Networks Deep Pack Inspection or DPI devices were utilized to secretly raise cash through cryptocurrency mining and affiliate ads in the country.

The Sandvine Corporation was obtained in September of 2017 by a private equity corporation Francisco Partner that purchased Procera Networks in the year 2015. Procera and Sandvine Networks then combined and have been generating a website-filtering software known as Packetlogic that the report claims might have been utilized by government-associated units in both Egypt and Turkey to inoculate spyware.

The Lab also discovered that the said software is fitting approximately 1 cryptocurrency mining script called as “Coinhive” that is freely accessible for mining XMR or the privacy-centric cryptocurrency monero.

With the help of a process, which started with scanning each of the IP address in specific countries, the investigators discovered DPI devices referred as “middleboxes,” which seize traffic on the network of Turk Telekom between the various and public unencrypted sites.

Those devices were utilized to redirect countless of users in Syria and Turkey to a nation-state spyware every time those users tried to download specific legitimate applications in Windows. The researchers also elaborated that the team discovered more than just a spyware.

They claimed that they’ve found similar middleboxes at the Telecom Egypt demarcation point. These were utilized to redirect thousands of users across tons of ISPs just to affiliate ads and peruse cryptocurrency mining scripts.

Telecom Egypt is known as the major telephone firm in the country along with a fixed line subscriber base of more than six million. It’s maintained by the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

On the other hand, the investigators named the revenue-generation scheme in Egypt as “Adhose.” The said report discussed that Adhose features 2 modes: the trickle mode and the spray mode. The former has the ability to redirect internet users all together to cryptocurrency mining scripts and ads every time they make a request to any site while the latter has the ability to defunct sites for ad injection and targets Javascript resources. The report uncovered that the scheme has been operating by the similar unit since October 2016.

While they are scanning a series of more than 5,000 IP addresses in January, which belonged to four of the 17 ASNs present in the country, the team resolved that 5,443 in 4 ASNs reverted the advertising redirect for an infection ratio of 95 percent.

The Citizen Lab delivered letters to Francisco and Sandvine Partners concluding their findings last month. It’s its response, Sandvine states that the report is wrong, misleading and false. Nonetheless, the lab claims they emphasized they’re confident in their research findings that the 2 peer reviews approved.

*****

For more information, please visit https://thecurrencyanalytics.com/.