How To Block Websites Using Your Processor For Mining

Some websites will use your processor for mining purposes when you visit them. Torrents for example do this a lot. If you are OK with that there is no problem but often these sites will not even ask you about it and still use your power to mine for their benefit. You can notice that this is happening when there is a huge spike in CPU usage when you visit a website. In case most of the browser tabs are closed, and no applications are running, there are chances that you are becoming a target of such a mining campaign.

Here are a couple of ways in which you can prevent this if you don t want it happening to you.
Most of the websites that are doing this are using a new service called Coin Hive for mining.

1. Use No Coin Chrome Extension
No Coin is a free solution. This open-source extension is a reliable and safe way to control how a website is interacting with your web browser.

As soon as you visit a website, No Coin will detect and show if any such activity is going on. You’ll see a red symbol as shown in the screenshot above. While this extension blocks any such activity, it also allows you to whitelist a website for a period of time.

2. Use minerBlock Chrome extension
Just like No Coin, minerBlock Chrome extension is another open-source tool that you can use to block cryptocurrency mining in the web browser. These extensions currently list a few popular miner domains to their list, and they are expected to add more once they get popularity.

Here’s how minerBlock notification looks like when visiting Coin Hive’s website:

3. Block coin mining domains in hosts file
This is the manual way of blocking particular domains that you don’t find harmful or irritating. Due to such blocking, your browser won’t be able to connect to these domains. We can edit the hosts file and redirect it to 0.0.0.0.

In Linux, you need to open the hosts file by running following command and add 0.0.0.0 coin-hive.com to the end of the document:

Code:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

In Linux, run the following command:

Code:

sudo nano /private/etc/hosts

For Windows, navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc and edit the hosts document to add 0.0.0.0 coin-hive.com at the end.

Please note that this change blocks the mining scripts which are hosted by coin-hive.com. In case you come across other mining script domains, you can add them further down the line.

4. Block domains in Ad blocker

Ad blocking extensions like AdBlock can help you block cryptocurrency mining. Depending on your web browser, you can find relevant settings to block particular domains. For example, in Chrome, for AdBlock, navigate to the list of extensions and find AdBlock. There, look for Customize > Block an ad by its URL. Then, add the following text in the text box:

https://coin-hive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js

5. Use NoScripts in Firefox
For Firefox, you can use JavaScript-blocking extensions like NoScript. Before using it to block cryptocurrency mining in the web browser, please note that it’s pretty aggressive and it could break lots of websites as it disables all scripts running on pages.

6. How to block CoinHive using Opera web browser
With release of Opera 50 web browser, the company brought in-built functionality to block CoinHive scripts and cryptocurrency mining techniques. This will allow the users to make sure that their computers don’t go crazy whenever any website using the digital coin mining technique is encountered. The users can find this option in Settings (Preferences on macOS) > Basic > Block ads and under the Recommended lists of ad filters.