http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/02/11/government-websites-secretly-mining-cryptocurrency/A host of government websites were found to be running a power-pinching program that uses visitors' computers to mine cryptocurrency, a process known as "cryptojacking".
Thousands of websites, including the Information Commissioner's Office, the Scottish NHS helpline and the Student Loans company along with hundreds of other central and local government sites appear to have been hijacked by hackers to mine cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
The services were infected with malware called Coinhive, which sits on a website and steals the processing power of its visitors' devices to mine Bitcoin or alternative coins that are stored in an anonymous digital wallet, to be withdrawn at a later date.
This is the kind of thing that gives cryptocurrency a bad name and makes govts mad.
Do not blame the tool, blame the people who are misusing that tool. You cannot stop people from doing stupid things. The
gain from this mining must be miniscule, because I experimented with Bitcoin mining on a desktop pc and the most I could
get from a average computer was 50 hashes/s. Even if you had 1000's of computers doing this, your gains would not even
be worth the risk.