Over 500 million people are inadvertently mining cryptocurrencies through their computers after visiting websites that are running background mining software, researchers have discovered.
Research by ad blocking firm AdGuard 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.
Visitors to the websites come from all over the world but the worst affected country is the U.S., with 18.7 percent of websites engaged in using in-browser cryptocurrency mining scripts coming from the United States.
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 most popular miner used ni ya Coin hive. just check the page source and search for coin hive js script
a good example ni hii hapa
[ATTACH=full]132225[/ATTACH]
from Coin Hive
Coinhive offers a JavaScript miner for the Monero Blockchain (Why Monero?) that you can embed in your website. Your users run the miner directly in their Browser and mine XMR for you in turn for an ad-free experience, in-game currency or whatever incentives you can come up with
nashuku sites za news za UK. my computer hangs when I go there and my data dissappears. kabla nisome article moja napata warning ya data usage 500MB imeenda na hakuna video naona.
Hehe… @uwesmake kuja hapa ujibu mashtaka. Kuna sites mingi zinatumia this codes including one of my favourite wallets Coinpot…but at least they have declared it.
Uwesmake why are you running illegal mining activities bila kuambia users.
Let’s say you have an oven at home(your computer). You use the oven to make bread etc(computer does useful stuff for you). You hire a chef to make bread on the oven (you visit a website for a service). The chef(website) makes bread for you (website gives you service) while at the same time, without your knowledge, using your oven (computer) flour and energy to make his own tasty cakes (stealing CPU cycles and memory to run scripts to mine bitcoin). Your computer suddenly runs slow and energy consumption shoots up.
Point is the chef(website), without your knowledge or permission makes use of your resouces (oven, flour & electricity -computing power +memory+energy) to derive some gain (cakes, Bitcoin)
The easiest way to identify if a site is using your CPU computing horse power for malicious tasks, just check the task manager on the processes tab. You’ll realize the CPU utilization is at a constant 100 or 99% utilisation. Even most intense of programs rarely utilise 80 % of your CPU power. Once the offending tab is closed the usage drops to normal. I once had this experience on ronaldo7.com and my comp almost came to a complete halt even though i use a freaking i7