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Over 500 Million PCs Are Secretly Mining Cryptocurrency, Researchers Reveal (newsweek.com)
Ad blocking firm AdGuard has found that over 500 million people are inadvertently mining cryptocurrencies through their computers after visiting websites that are running background mining software. The company found 220 popular websites with an aggregated audience of half a billion people use so-called crypto-mining scripts when a user opens their main page. Newsweek reports: The mining tool works by hijacking a computer's central processing unit (CPU), commonly referred to as "the brains" of a computer. Using part of a computer's CPU to mine bitcoin effects the machine's overall performance and will slow it down by using up processing power. The researchers found that bitcoin browser mining is mostly found on websites "with a shady reputation" due to the trouble such sites have with earning revenue through advertising. However, in the future it could become a legitimate and ethical way of making money if the website requests the permission of the visitor first.
"220 sites may not seem like a lot," the researchers wrote in a blogpost detailing their discovery. "But CoinHive was launched less than one month ago on September 14. The growth has been extremely rapid: from nearly zero to .22 percent of Alexa's top 100,000 websites. "This analysis well illustrates the whole web, so it's safe to say that one of every forty websites currently mines cryptocurrency (namely Monero) in the browsers their users employ."
"220 sites may not seem like a lot," the researchers wrote in a blogpost detailing their discovery. "But CoinHive was launched less than one month ago on September 14. The growth has been extremely rapid: from nearly zero to .22 percent of Alexa's top 100,000 websites. "This analysis well illustrates the whole web, so it's safe to say that one of every forty websites currently mines cryptocurrency (namely Monero) in the browsers their users employ."
Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho
Follow the "raw research data" link from the original blog post, https://blog.adguard.com/en/cr...
Jesus mother fucking Christ bouncing on an inverted mother fucking pogo stick, are you seriously including shit like this in what you choose to reference in the goddamned mother fucking summary?
BeauHD, if you're so goddamned fucking stupid that you need to point to articles which have this drivel, and include it here on Slashdot ... you're not fucking qualified to post fucking articles to Slashdot.
Go the fuck home, suck your thumb, and shut the fuck up.
Anybody on Slashdot who doesn't know what is CPU is, please, for the sake of all of us, go home, shut up, and fucking kill yourself in shame.
Fuck people, if you can't cite intelligent articles, don't fucking use them at all.
How did we get such retards posting articles on Slashdot? Fucking hell, Slashdot really is dying.
The mining tool works by hijacking a computer's central processing unit (CPU), commonly referred to as "the brains" of a computer
Wow, that's amazing! Who would have thought of carrying out an attack in this manner!
Gee, none of us here knew that. Thanks a lot Sherlock, for that amazing piece of information!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Let's get down to brass tacks: How do I stop the bitminer? Can't I just close the web page? Or do I need to close the whole browser? Does the miner start up again when I relaunch my browser? I've been watching Firefox hog 4/5th of my PC's resources, with chronic pauses ("the browser has stopped responding") so bad that I can't switch tabs and even animated gifs freeze. Other programs run like nothing's going on. It gets worse and worse as the day goes on. Every add-on disabled. I visit one of these affected websites a couple times a week.
So... rampant abuse of the unsuspecting public -- which, one could argue, *should* generate a bit of outrage here.. ...and y'all are busy outraging about what a shoddy article was used to make this summary?!
C'mon guys. Get with it! So what if the summary is crap -- the message is this shit (the cryptomining) is spreading like wildfire. That's where the outrage should be!
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Re AC and "web site they visited to have scripting control over their browser?"
A site offers no ads and its archives for x % of CPU use for y mins.
The user can build up an amount that grants ad free and/or archive use.
No credit card needed.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Does this include Slashdot and its other sites?
Glancing down at the CPU core usage meters on the task bar, each at about 1% ...
Probably not.
The effect is quite audible on my macbook pro. If I visit thepiratebay results page and disable adblock plus, the fans noise up from zero to the top speed in 30 seconds. Firefox CPU usage jumps to 25%. This stops as soon as the web page is closed, of course.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
P.S. Could that be a reason for inconsistencies in battery life tests of the latest MBPs?
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Since microtransactions are too expensive (due to high transaction fees) on many cryptocurrency networks, it makes sense that free websites would just have the visitor do some mining instead. Instead of say 2 satoshis to view an article on Wall Street Journal, you just donate a certain number of hashes (total, not per second) per article.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
There isn't 500 million PCs worth of people in the world who know what a load average is or how to investigate when it's pegged.
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
Honestly, this seems preferable to me to being bombarded with ads on some website.
But let's be honest here - no site that assaults you with a ton of ads is going to switch over to having the visitors mine coins - they're just going to add that the list of things they use to make money, along with the ads.
There are a lot of people would just grumble and chalk it up to a PC being flaky.
" 2.2 percent of Alexa's top 100,000 websites."
Uh, 2.2% of 100000 is 2200, not 220. So, should it be top 10,000, or what?
I'd rather support a website with cpu cycles anonymously than advertising. They have to eat too.
For every dollar their visitors pay to the electric company, the site earns a penny. It is an incredibly inefficient way to pay for content.
We need a decent system for micropayments.
Those numbers are based on total monthly traffic stats. Only a small number of this "total" users are affected.
It has the positive externality to secure crypto in a very decentralised manner. This counts for many as a huge positive development.
The mining tool works by hijacking a computer's central processing unit (CPU), commonly referred to as "the brains" of a computer.
Idiocracy, here we come. I suspect we'll have to start talking in 3rd grade language when Kid Rock is president.
We'll make great pets
In Safari, enable "Developer" mode (Preferences / Advanced / Check the "Show Develop menu in menu bar") then you can simply use that menu and enable/disable javascript from there. There's also options to enable/disable images, styles, etc.
#DeleteFacebook
Dogecoin, Reddcoins or some other crypto-currency can fill the job of micropayments.
#DeleteFacebook
Disable javascript? 95% of the websites out there will stop working.
I've even seen websites where javascript fetches and displays the whole page, without javascript all I had was a blank page. Now that is madness.
#DeleteFacebook
Have you seen the number of websites that don't work at all without javascript in 2017?
If you find this comment funny, insightful or interesting, please donate a few Dogecoins to DNsSKbyNsi7369SGdvbKqLM9h4D5wAvmGD.
#DeleteFacebook
I'd wager most users wouldn't know their CPU was pegged, they have no idea what Task Manager or "top" are... much less how to open it or read it.
For them, they just see "My browser is really slow" or "this site is slow" and don't think much of it.
The real question is how long until this "feature" is included in WordPress?
More like, I wonder how long until this "feature" is included in every app out there, even if it is just 1% of CPU done over a time when someone isn't looking.