Mark Alex Simon, the ring leader of a Bitcoin-fuelled fake ID ring, has been sentenced to two years in federal prison, the Toledo Blade reports .

The Ohio resident was sentenced by US District Court Judge Jeffrey Helmick on Thursday after pleading guilty to charges in June.

Speaking to the judge , Simon said that selling the fake IDs gave him a sense of financial security .

He hoped to grow his business by employing his co-defendants Aaron Kuns, Sarah Alberts, and Benjamin Stalets, he added.

As previously reported by Hard Fork last month, Kuns was sentenced to one year and one day in US federal prison. He will also be subject to three years on supervised release and will have to hand over his cryptocurrency holdings.

Alberts is due to be sentenced on October 8, while Stalets will find out his fate in December.

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Hackers secretly ran cryptocurrency mining malware on Indian government sites

The crypto-jacking epidemic has spread to India. It has come to light that tons of Indian government sites have been infected with cryptocurrency mining malware, designed to steal visitors’ computing power to earn coins.

Among others, the attackers targeted the websites of the Andhra Pradesh municipality, the Tirupati Municipal Corporation, and the Macherla municipality, the India Times reports .

The malware was first discovered by a group of Guwahati-based security researchers Shakil Ahmed, Anish Sarma and Indrajeet Bhuyan. The group identified that the affected websites were subdomains of the most visited websites in the country.

The government has since confirmed the attack is indeed authentic. As of yesterday, the websites were still actively mining cryptocurrency.

How much cryptocurrency has been mined from these scripts has not yet been disclosed. According to the report, the affected pages were running the popular CoinHive script, built for mining anonymous currency Monero.

Alongside the affected government domains, a further 119 Indian websites have been identified as running the notorious CoinHive script.

The CoinHive script – and other crypto-jacking schemes – work by running a piece of code on certain websites which then uses the computing power of the visitor to that website to mine cryptocurrency. The person browsing that website is most likely unaware that this is going on. This means the user is saddled with an increased electricity bill, while the scammers make off with any mined cryptocurrency.

Indeed, much profit can be earned from this type of crypto-jacking hack. Only a month ago researchers from RWTH Aachen University , Germany, estimated that the CoinHive script running across the world was generating over $250,000 per month in Monero .

Only 9% of Russians actually know anything about Bitcoin

A recent survey conducted by the state-owned Russian public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) has found the country is well acquainted with the term Bitcoin, but lacks a detailed knowledge of cryptocurrency.

According to the results , 56 percent of Russians know about Bitcoin and 18 percent have heard of the term. But only nine percent said they have a detailed knowledge of the cryptocurrency.

The survey interviewed 1,600 Russians aged 18 and over, via telephone on April 4, 2019.

As you might expect, the level of Bitcoin awareness is greatest among younger generations; 67 percent of 18-24 year olds said they are aware of it.

Some 37 percent of respondents who know about or have heard about Bitcoin said they are sure anyone can buy the cryptocurrency. Interestingly, 12 percent thought it was banned in Russia, which is technically not true as cryptocurrencies remain unregulated in the country.

Perhaps most resoundingly is that of those that know about Bitcoin, 65 percent think it’s a bad investment. Only 2 percent of people in this group have actually ever bought any.

Either Russians aren’t actually that keen on buying the cryptocurrency, or maybe, in the face of a state-backed survey, they’re just keeping their cards close to their chest.

While this survey might show that the Russian public might not know much about Bitcoin, the same can’t be said of the government.

Last month, the Russian government removed any mention of cryptocurrency from its digital asset bill. Reports have also suggested that the country is leveraging Bitcoin to bypass trade sanctions , mostly those imposed by the US.

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