Website mining Bitcoin without permission?

[digitx]

After reading about the Pirate Bay hijacking web miners (https://gizmodo.com/the-pirate-bay-added-a-cpu-hijacking-bitcoin-miner-to-s-1818488143) I wondered if anyone had created a list of such sites. How would you even detect that the site is stealing compute power from your device?

[mobnepal]

Coinhive.com is the site that provides simple code which can be integrated in any webpage that will start mining using CPU of visitors. What they earn might not be significant if they don't have thousands of users active at any point but many sites might still have this code embedded because of greed.

You can open site which you suspect in your browser than go to task manager it will show how much CPU is being used while site is open, if it is using very high than probably site have browser miner embedded.

[crazyivan]

A decent AV will all appropriate modules should detect this and block your access to a website having this miner hidden in it.

Even without it, it s not a big deal, these scrypts use a very low amount of your CPU power so you do not identify it. Does not change much for you and the amount of extra power you might end up paying is just a few cents on a monthly level.

[rainbow169]

It will be hard to keep tracking of sites with certain script, instead if you are worried about mining in the browser, just install extension like no coin or antiminer in chrome which should block all 3rd party miners, first party miner however a bit more tricky I think.

[jseverson]

There's really no way to precisely find out if a site is using your CPU for mining, but yeah, the telltale sign is the spike in CPU usage whenever you visit the website. It's fairly easy to stop though. The No Coin extension should keep your browser mining free. You could also go ahead and stop your browser from using scripts altogether, either manually or with other extensions.

Some malicious ads can also steal your CPU power, so you might want to block those too, but it's always a good practice to block ads by default anyway.

This raises a good question though: Would you favor a site's decision to mine visitors' CPU in lieu of ads for revenue?

[EXtremeAEX]

Try to avoid those sites that you know does that. You can disable Javascript, and it can block out the miner running in the background as it is mostly likely using Javascript. You can prevent this by having add-ons to your browser, such as ScriptBlock, which I use for Chrome.

I am not sure, but I think it is possible to detect the 'BTC/Monero' miner by 'inspect element' on the site. Apparently this is actually a threat that is getting more common, called Cryptojacking. Had a good read here.

https://www.wired.com/story/cryptojacking-cryptocurrency-mining-browser/

[hessanseen]

Yes, don't mess in some mining site. Especially if you go in, don't mess around.
Before that, I went in to a miner to talk about the community. It turns out that the browser was hijacked.
Some websites may steal your passwords. Friends must do a good job of backup.

[doedz]

thats why we need to carefull to choose what site to visit,and if your pc or phone start lagging when browsing you better close that tab immediatly. the earning maybe not much but if that site have 10k visitor per day can u imagine how much they got

Is this a criminal ?, I am a customer of pirate bay. I downloaded some apps and movies there.
after this I will leave it. thank you for caring.

[QHoster.]

Shouldn't sites like that be reported somewhere? Or at least they should ask permission of their visitors.

[Zorbak]

Shouldn't sites like that be reported somewhere? Or at least they should ask permission of their visitors.

If it's an official or legit site they will not do it, or if they are caught something big could happen. From a website where the most of downloads are illegal, do you expect to report  them somewhere?

[Eternu]

I have heard that some sites uses scrypts or what ever, to use visitors CPU for mining. Even if that is a low percentage, still it doesn't mean its right. Using peoples resources without permission is crime. I will try that addon no coin, hope it will help. I guess that we need to expect more things like this in the future. People should be even more careful, because this days it seams nothing is safe.

[FoxTheHuman]

After reading about the Pirate Bay hijacking web miners (https://gizmodo.com/the-pirate-bay-added-a-cpu-hijacking-bitcoin-miner-to-s-1818488143) I wondered if anyone had created a list of such sites. How would you even detect that the site is stealing compute power from your device?

There are many such websites appearing on the internet . This is an unauthorized mining operation without user approval.

[arseaboy]

I have heard that some sites uses scrypts or what ever, to use visitors CPU for mining. Even if that is a low percentage, still it doesn't mean its right. Using peoples resources without permission is crime. I will try that addon no coin, hope it will help. I guess that we need to expect more things like this in the future. People should be even more careful, because this days it seams nothing is safe.

That's right even decent site which we think that's not doing it there's still possibilities that it will happen if money talks then surely things would be change, its an easy earnings just by using their website and not informing their visitors they can earned lots of money hope someone can create the list.

[krauzzer02]

This is alarming and totally illegal most for those who have a weak computer that can cause a problem in browsing experience. For those who have a good computer it's not really obvious. to prevent this is to have a noscript utilized in your firefox browser or to have a Adblocker plus and add No coin extension, it can also installed in Chrome browsers. We really want to end this mess like coinhive did to mine monero and other such sites.

[Almat]

Wow, that's news to me. I did not think that was possible. Oh well, time to enable those script blockers kids!

[Beerwizzard]

If this kind of mining is not that harmfull for our devices then whats bad here? I found the argumentation given by those websites pretty logical. Instead of common ads (sometimes hey can't be locked by adblock and they are very annoying or some websites are not available while using adblock) service owners can monetize it by mining. It seems like the pirate bay realy needs that money. Just remember all block attempts and trials against them.

[Kencha77]

After reading about the Pirate Bay hijacking web miners (https://gizmodo.com/the-pirate-bay-added-a-cpu-hijacking-bitcoin-miner-to-s-1818488143) I wondered if anyone had created a list of such sites. How would you even detect that the site is stealing compute power from your device?

It can easily be detected if your CPU/GPU usage is using its full computing power even if the task you're doing is not supposed to be using all of that

[mOgliE]

I don't see the problem here.

Guys do you seriously believe that anyone would sacrifice themselves by creating something like pirate bay without any personal return?
Remember: if it's free it's that you're the product.

You can pay every film and game you dowload illegally on something like pirate bay
Or you can chose to give them parts of your CPU power to mine btc and pay them like this.

Easy choice for me!

[Emoclaw]

Simply use any app, whether it's an antivirus or a simple blocker to block coinhive.com.
Malwarebytes Premium just blocks that website and lets you keep accessing websites that use it without issues.

It's important to note that there are some legitimate sites such as CBS's Showtime that were caught using coinhive code as well.

I don't see the problem here.

Guys do you seriously believe that anyone would sacrifice themselves by creating something like pirate bay without any personal return?
Remember: if it's free it's that you're the product.

You can pay every film and game you dowload illegally on something like pirate bay
Or you can chose to give them parts of your CPU power to mine btc and pay them like this.

Easy choice for me!

The problem is that they already earn money through ads, but over 50% of people use AdBlock which is why they have to resort to other methods.

[krisnt80]

Well if the script will only use a part of the gpu it wont make a big difference at all, sure isnt ethical, but well some people did found a way to mine without need the miners and big investment. Some websites had incorporated those to get some extra revenue to keep their websites alive, i believe faucets will have thoose since it can became an extra source of income, and will be hard to keep trace of all websites using those.