Did you know? Some Websites secretly use your computer for mining cryptocurrency?
BY NICOLAE PAVELEAN| DECEMBER 17th, 2017
Cryptocurrencies are becoming more and more popular globally, and with this increase in their presence in everyday life, there are players who want to exploit others in order to avoid wasting their own resources life electricity for example or computer performances.
Recently, some of the websites and extensions of them have been created dedicated to use your processor resources to keep cryptocurrencies in a process known as cryptojacking.
To prove that, one of the Security researchers, by name Willem de Groot has analyzed an important part of the internet and discovered 2,496 sites that use this method to get your CPU power and use it in coin mining, such as Monero.
In Mr. Groot's opinion, almost all of these web pages are running outdated software with security issues. Thus, attackers manage to reach source code of sites and add mining software. Also, about 80% of verified sites, have malware that attempts to steal the details of visitor credit cards.
Most of these sites use a mining application on the Coinhive website, requiring just a copy of the mining code in the site code.
Some sites do not hide and use the coinhive.js file directly, while others are more cautious and use various hiding methods, such as iframes with names like siteverification.online.
How to protect your computer from Websites that intend to use it
There are some important extensions for your browser that can prevent the secretly usage of your computer.
The three extension that I personally tried and I can say that are effective, are:
- Ad blocker Chrome Extension
- No Coin Chrome Extension
- MinerBlock Chrome extension
Using such extensions will definitely help you avoid such issues but if you feel comfortable to let your CPU be used for mining and if the website that you access, is notifying you as soon as you visit it that they inted to use a certain part of your performances to mine than you can simply accept and let them do that. But if you do that you need to know how much mining load can your CPU take.
(clicking any image will take you to its source)
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Please leave a comment here if you share my opinion or disagree with it.
