coinhive
Latest
Salon asks readers to pick their poison: ads or crypto mining
If you use an ad-blocker, you'll now be met with a pop-up when you visit Salon's website, the Financial Times reports. It will offer you two choices -- turn off your ad-blocker or let the website mine cryptocurrency with some of your computer's extra processing power. Salon says on its site that it makes its money off of advertisements, but because more and more readers are now using ad-blockers, it has seen a large drop in revenue. Cryptocurrency mining is its way of recuperating those losses. "Like most media sites, ad-blockers cut deeply into our revenue and create a more one-sided relationship between reader and publisher," Salon says. "For our beta program, we'll start by applying your processing power to mine cryptocurrencies to recoup lost ad revenue when you use an ad blocker. We plan to further use any learnings from this to help support the evolution and growth of blockchain technology, digital currencies and other ways to better service the value exchange between content and user contribution."
Cryptocurrency mining site hijacked millions of Android phones
Smartphone users are just as vulnerable to cryptocurrency mining hijacks as their PC counterparts, and sometimes on a dramatic scale. Malwarebytes has detailed a "drive-by" mining campaign that redirected millions of Android users to a website that hijacked their phone processors for mining Monero. While the exact trigger wasn't clear, researchers believed that infected apps with malicious ads would steer people toward the pages. And it wasn't subtle -- the site would claim that you were showing "suspicious" web activity and tell you that it was mining until you entered a captcha code to make it stop.
Government websites fall prey to cryptocurrency mining hijack
It's not just private companies' websites falling victim to cryptocurrency mining hijacks. Security consultant Scott Helme and the Register have discovered that intruders compromised over 4,200 sites with Coinhive's notorious Monero miner, many of them government websites from around the world. This includes the US court info system, the UK's National Health Service and Australian legislatures, among others. The intruders spread their JavaScript code by modifying an accessibility plugin for the blind, Texthelp's Browsealoud, to inject the miner wherever Browsealoud was in use.
As online ads fail, sites mine cryptocurrency
Between the incessant headlines and chatter on social media, it feels like everywhere we go some libertarian evangelist appears asking us if we have a second to talk about the blockchain -- like a religious wingnut lurking outside the grocery store.
Politifact inadvertently hosted a digital currency miner
You might expect a pirate website to use something as shady as a secret cryptocurrency miner, but that's now becoming a problem with above-board sites -- and it's not on purpose. Politifact visitors have discovered that the site was inadvertently hosting JavaScript code that hijacked your processor to mine virtual coins. The fact checker tells TechCrunch that it has removed the code and is investigating just how it got there, but it's more than a little alarming that such a popular page (3.2 million views per month) could be susceptible to parasitic code that bogs down your PC.
Showtime websites used visitors’ browsers to mine cryptocurrency
Over the weekend, visitors to Showtime's website or its streaming site ShowtimeAnytime might have noticed their computers slowing down a bit. That's because someone slipped in some JavaScript into the sites that caused them to siphon off processing time from users' browsers in order to mine the cryptocurrency Monero. The Register reports that the software took up as much as 60 percent of visitors' CPU capacity.
