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THE BIZNOB – Global Business & Financial News – A Business Journal – Focus On Business Leaders, Technology – Enterpeneurship – Finance – Economy – Politics & LifestyleTHE BIZNOB – Global Business & Financial News – A Business Journal – Focus On Business Leaders, Technology – Enterpeneurship – Finance – Economy – Politics & Lifestyle

Technology

Technology

Cryptocurrency mining program Coinhive sparks controversy

Coinhive, a Javascript application that uses website visitors’ computing power to mine cryptocurrency, launched on September 14. Since, the program has generated controversy, as website owners and hackers alike insert it into a number of high-profile websites.

Coinhive markets itself as a legitimate way for websites to make money, but does not endorse the use of the script without user consent.

On September 16, The Pirate Bay, a popular torrent-downloading website, began using the program to mine Monero, a cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin. Visitors to the site noticed spikes in their CPU usage and complained.

Later that day, The Pirate Bay issued a statement explaining that it was testing the program as an alternative to advertisements on the site.

“This is only a test. We really want to get rid of all the ads. But we also need enough money to keep the site running,” reads the statement.

Though all content on The Pirate Bay is free, the site needs to generate revenue to cover operating costs. Many of the ads that run on Pirate Bay are unseemly and/or contain malware.

The Pirate Bay’s statement says Coinhive “can be blocked by a normal ad-blocker”—AdBlock Plus and AdGuard now combat Coinhive, BleepingComputer notes. A typo in the embedded code originally caused the program to use more of visitors’ processing power than intended.

The Pirate Bay invited users to comment as to whether they would prefer advertisements or mining programs like Coinhive.

The majority of users who responded accepted mining as a viable way for the site to generate revenue, but many took issue with the site’s failure to inform users of the change.

“I think this is an interesting idea,” one user responded. “Keeping users informed is essential though. Giving registered users possibility of choosing between ads and mining might be also viable (though most of them probably block ads). Having more options how to contribute is a great idea! I will gladly contribute by providing part of my CPU when visiting TPB (as opposed to ads, I don’t like these especially due to privacy concerns).”

Other respondents acknowledged that those who downloaded free content had to pay in some way or another.

The Pirate Bay has removed the mining program from its site and has yet to say whether it plans to employ Coinhive in the future.

BleepingComputer reported Monday that it had detected the program in websites run by Showtime, a media company owned by CBS. Showtime’s main site, showtime.com, as well as its streaming domain, showtimeanytime.com, contained the Coinhive script.

It is not known whether a hacker implemented the script on the Showtime sites, or whether the company itself was testing the program. But BleepingComputer notes that the script had been set to “remain dormant” for 97 percent of the time. A hacker, that publication points out, would likely set the script to run far more often, so as to co-opt much processing power as possible before his scam was discovered.

Showtime declined to comment on the matter. The script disappeared from the sites early Monday afternoon.

Using victims’ CPU processing power to mine for cryptocurrency has long been a common practice amongst malware designers, but prior to the inception of programs like Coinhive, hackers had to download an application onto a victim’s hard drive in order to use his computer. Now, hackers can seize the processing power of any user running a Javascript-enabled browser (most browsers enable Javascript by default).

Malware developers have already embraced Coinhive. One embedded it in a Google Chrome extension, so that it ran in the background of the browser. Others have breached WordPress and Magneto sites and inserted the code there.

Some have registered commonly mistyped URLs, such as “twitter.com.com,” as domains, and run Coinhive on those sites. The program only runs until the user realizes he has input the wrong URL and leaves the page, but with enough traffic and enough domains, the engineers of the scam could generate a considerable profit.

EITest, one of the world’s most prominent malware operations, has also employed Coinhive for nefarious purposes.

Coinhive is not the first program of its kind. In 2013, Vice reports, MIT researchers developed a similar script called TidBit. But a court order shut the project down, ruling that using a person’s CPU processing power without his consent was unlawful.

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons


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