The Pirate Bay Added a CPU- Hijacking Bitcoin Miner to Some Pages. File- sharing websites are not exactly known for their sterling reputation, though a few such as famed torrent site the Pirate Bay have been around for long enough while generally avoiding shady behavior they’ve acquired a certain cachet with the internet community. But gotta gett that cash, baby, and banner ads might not be cutting it any more in the age of ubiquitous ad blocking. The Pirate Bay has added a Javascript- based bitcoin miner to its homepage, Torrent Freak wrote, causing some users to notice “that their CPU usage increased dramatically when they browsed certain Pirate Bay pages.”The plugin, which is provided by Coinhive, puts users’ computers to work mining Monero, a cryptocurrency released in 2. According to Torrent Freak, the miner was throttled to rates from between 0. Coinhive’s website does result in an immediate and hard to miss increase in CPU utilization.
Torrent Freak said they were told the miner was being tested for 2. In the meantime, users on the Pirate Bay’s subreddit were not happy, with several users complaining that the site never informed users the miner was running, let alone asked permission. Using a file- sharing website was never going to be a risk- free endeavor, though users could disable the miner with a plugin like No. Script or Script. Block or by adding Coinhive to an ad blocker’s blacklist. Embedding bitcoin- mining scripts into a website is not exactly new, though the secret addition of Coinhive to one of the world’s most popular file- sharing websites is throwing up red flags.
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File-sharing websites are not exactly known for their sterling reputation, though a few such as famed torrent site the Pirate Bay have been around for long enough. While we’re waiting for the solar eclipse later on in the month, we’ll be cooling our heels in August hiding out in the air conditioning, and catching up on the.
As noted by Beta. News, Coinhive’s own documentation advises: The miner itself does not come with a UI – it’s your responsibility to tell your users what’s going on and to provide stats on mined hashes. While it’s possible to run the miner without informing your users, we strongly advise against it. Watch Not Safe For Work Online (2017). You know this. Long term goodwill of your users is much more important than any short term profits.
Malware which siphons unsuspecting users’ CPUs for spare cycles to mine cryptocurrency is a common problem, though peaked years ago in 2. Quartz. The amount of processing power it takes to mine Bitcoin has risen 7. However, with the ongoing explosion in initial coin offerings and new crypto variants, there might still be opportunities to cash in with methods that have stopped working with older cryptocurrencies.[Torrent Freak].