Bitcoin Forum

looks like bitkong site is secretly mining on users machine - (Browsermining) !!

have anyone observed it ? bitkong webpage is consuming 90% of CPU usage, Not sure which crypto but I guess probably monero

Coinhive (https://coinhive.com) makes it really easy to integrate mining into your webpage, without notifying the user.
The anonymous nature of Monero makes this even more attractive for website owners or
people who gained access to the source code of a website in a malicious way.

I fear that we will see a ton of similar incidents in the future.

Is there a way to specifically tell if some third/outside party is covertly or surreptitiously using your computer to mine cryptocurrency for them? When I open up my task manager and look at all the stuff running on my cpu, most of the apps and processes look legit, but some of the things I have absolutely no clue what they are exactly. Is there any software like malwarebytes or ad-aware than can detect if someone is using your cpu to mine?

I didn't find any coinhive or similar script on the site. But the CPU use is unusually high. Might be some unknown mining script.
And found the CPU use spike is mostly on loading the site, might be the graphics.

It is very sneaky and underhanded, probably illegal, to use peoples machines like this without prior permission. However it is a very interesting avenue for website owners to generate advertising revenue, as long as their users have been informed in advance. Do ad blocking add-ons for browsers block these browser miners? Seems like a good idea to install it on any machine

No Ad block apps are not yet that sophisticated to identify it.

Antivirus like kaspersky are found to block them. Don't know about ad blockers, I have an Adblockplus but didn't found out which ads did it block.

If theres a spike then its normal because it do just come down and normalize its movement but the spike happen without any changes later on then there would really be something on that site.As assumed maybe they do secretly operate mining without users knowledge.I havent tried about bitkong. I will try later on if it does really consume cpu usage.

Man, what a sneaky crappy thing to do. Not sure of the ins and outs about how they can do that through your computer, but it is something that is nice to be aware of.

I don't think so mate  ;)

umm !! looks like site is choosing random users to avoid users outcry

Do you make any video or capture screen of task manager before opening bitkong site and after closing website?

I've never seen that site before. The idea of using crypto mining as a captcha is...interesting. I've certainly never seen it before. I wonder if we'll start to see this kind of stuff elsewhere.

how can one verify if they are doing this with certainty?

It's pretty obvious, when you navigate to their website you'll be able to see your CPU usage go up dramatically and when you close it, it goes back down. You can tell for sure usually if you look through the source of the website but that's not as easy as just opening task manager.

That is actually becoming a trend now, and that worries me. At least for now some big sites have been discovered, and that means that the awareness of users is increasing, so many more reports like this will probably come, and eventually these abusive uses will stop.

I think they're not using user's machines to mine monero! it's just the graphics and recent bets/stats causing so much load, i removed recent bets(using developers tools on chrome) and CPU usage went down a lot, also tried running it in mobile mod, wasn't heavy on my laptop. ;)

Do you have proof that they are using your machine to mine monero?
Because I just went to site and it consumed 30 or 40% of CPU, I don't think they are mining anything.

Yes I agree. Just Saying "oh it mines at 90% could use" is bit good enough and why are other users bit reporting such high usage ? I don't know why a site like this would use much could at all and if it is then something strange is going on. If you want to know for sure you should use a program that monitors it and in and close the oage a few times and see if anything that should not be running is. Otherwise it is just naysay.

Doesn't even reach 10% CPU here lol. Quickly looked in source code and didn't see anything special either.

Rationally we should expect scripts like that on shit sites where the site owner has no other way to earn money from their visitors. A gambling site is quite the opposite of that, so it would not make any sense for them to screw over their visitors like that.

Better to do a math before conspiracy theories! :) Though sometimes website use a lot of resources because of heavy graphics and we have room for optimization. We are going to release a new version soon which will be more lightweight.

OP most likely used Chrome and had a number of tabs running at the same time. Chrome can get weird at times and overload your PC. I have a decent one and chrome tabs are taking a crazy amount of RAM (like 8GB at times) and 30% cpu. If a browser really starts using your PC for mining you're gonna feel it.

Well it depends what kind of CPU you have.

If you have a crappy old Pentium 4 CPU, then most websites will use like 100% cpu load because they don't have the proper optimizations for it.

If you are using an i7 and its very high load, then its possible they are browser mining.

However most sites that do this do it to remove ads, and they usually limit CPU usage to like 25% or so never 100%.

as long as it's profitable someone's going to do it. i remember the csgo league ESEA scandal that happened a while back; one of the devs implemented a gpu miner into their client and made a huge botnet that mined bitcoins for him. this was, of course, way back when gpu mining was still semi profitable, cant remember exactly when it was though, a simple google search will tell you everything youd want to know if youre interested in looking that up. either way, these two incidents are quite similar, and with cryptocurrencies slowly gaining traction and gaining a wider userbase, id imagine we could expect to see more instances of this happening, especially with a service to implement this on a website readily available. weather or not it becomes an accepted thing is an entirely different matter however. id imagine most users wouldnt like this very much.

This is actually a pretty interesting concept, I know the piratebay is doing something similar. You'd need tons of users for this to be relatively profitable though.

you would need visitors to stay long on the site as well
what could be better than an autobet on a dice site in a browser that can be running for hours if not days *winks*
unfortunately,due to the recent hype around thepiratebay and showtime,coinhive stated that they are planning to have their script
ask the user's permission before it starts using their resources now

I actually implemented a "mining faucet" for bustabitv2 where you explicitly turn on a miner and then can collect the value of what you mine into your BaB account. However, the economics really suck. When I sandboxed the script, on my macbook pro it was only able to make about ~3 satoshis per hour. Unsandboxed and using all my cores, it would only get as high as 7 satoshis per hour. Considering the min bet on bustabit is 100 satoshis, I can't imagine many people are going to want to mine for 12+ hours to make a single bet.

I can't imagine it really makes any sense unless you've got millions of visitors on your site

Logic dictates that the more people visits the website the more rewards the owners will take, even it just a sat per visitors/players it can still profitable just like you have said and its not impossible to have some millions of visitors especially for those well known website.

Let's all CPU mine!!!!!!
This is something interesting!

A few days ago just saw some news that some antivirus company said that someone was using thousands of computers to CPU mine some coins :D

I hope I am wronf but looks like a trend already  >:(

Few days ago there were some articles about piratebay and their browser based miner.
Google about it and you'll get more info.

Showtime was doing it as well, while customers used their web player / were watching series online.

I'd say it's close to dreaming for crypto gambling sites to have "millions of visitors" on a regular basis.

That's not unfortunately, unless you're one of those crooks.

Just checked my browser mining capacity and what I can mine is just 2 cents worth of monero per day, lets multiply this by 1000 users at a time which will be like $20 per day considering site will have 1000 users+ online at any given time.

I don't think this is worth for bitkong because they are earning way higher than this little amount per day just from their games. I think site is using so high amount of CPU because they have really heavy graphics in their site.

I guess this solves the mystery of this case.

I also think bitkong will not risk their gambling site for some puny profits from browser mining. This is totally just a waste of time even for the operator. The only way, is like what RHavar said, it would be that there are millions of visitors going on the site.

Being that there are limited users of bitcoin even, I don't think there are millions of visitors on bitcoin.

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To really make sure you don't fall victim to these kinds of attacks, better get an adblocker. I use adnauseam.

well,of course bitkong would never attempt such a thing
their game is popular and brings them enough not to bother with browser mining pennies
risking their reputation in the process
oh and have you seen their site? it loads with sound and graphics from the get go
takes around 20 -30 seconds on my machine to fully load the page,so imagine them adding this code :)
would stall the user's machines to a halt

Whats for they use other people to mine?mean while they can get easy money just from opening gambling site. This is does not add up, more over if their people online not even up to 100. I think they never do this, just higher usage of cpu does not mean they have mine from your computer or laptop. This is because of their merely high graphic here or may be some of their design really cost a lot of usage

they don't mine,their owner was in this thread
Bitkong is a respected gambling site,so they would not try anything of sorts
its not Showtime (just jidding),yeah their site is not optimised properly and too heavy on grpahics,imho
but this is not because of the shady mining scripts at all

But what can you say on eating up 90% of CPU process? No matter how big the graphics it is it wont really consume up that big. I cant say that they would do shady thing knowing bitkong is a reputable gambling site and doing shady thing would really destroy their credibility maybe op did open some applications which would cause up for its cpu process to be that high.

it doesn't reach 90% on my machine,it is a heavy and unoptimised site,yes
it does have excessive graphics and music
but it doesn't use this browsermining code,period
I'm not sure why would they first place for the reasons stated above
it is simple logics and not every site owner is greedy and stupid

It is javascript code which hack others CPU without informing them.
Using Javascript one person hack another persons CPU and do the mining for his own account.
if you have antivirus installed that will catch this js file and will ask to remove.

some website ask for mining with CPU with User's Permission but most of not.
so  if your system fan start Making noice suddenly then check how much CPU using that time.

if possible try to disable java script of browser but after that many functionality of other website will not work .

most of people use it in there own website . so whenever  you open that website it can catch  you. :)