Have you been "mined" today? Research shows that the CPUs of more than 500 million Internet users have been hijacked

The company behind the ad blocking software Adguard analyzed the 100,000 most popular websites based on cryptocurrency mining scripts. They found that more than 5亿人are mining cryptocurrencies, but "they don't know they are mining." During the three-week study, each website running such scripts could earn about 4.3万美元.

More than 500 million people affected

As news of websites using users' browsers to mine cryptocurrencies increases, the makers of the ad blocking software Adguard of the same name recently analyzed some websites with cryptocurrency mining scripts. They checked the top 100,000 websites in Alexa (a website that publishes website rankings). Adguard co-founder and CTO Andrey Meshkov announced his company's analysis results last Thursday.

Meshkov wrote:

We searched for Coinhive and JSEcoin codes, which are the most commonly used browser mining solutions.

The analysis results show that 220 out of 100,000 websites are using cryptocurrency mining scripts, and the most "infected" countries are the United States, India, Russia and Brazil.

Meshkov revealed:

We found 220 websites that start mining when users open their homepages, with about 500 million active users. Affected users are spread all over the world, including the United States, China, South America, European countries, Russia, India, Iran, etc.

Mining income replaces advertising income

Adguard estimates that each website running a cryptocurrency mining script earned about $43,000 during their three-week investigation. Meshkov said that although they did not make a profit of over a million, "the cost of making this money is almost zero."

He said that most of the sites that use mining scripts are "pirated TV and video sites, Torrent trackers, and porn sites." He explained that video platforms are a great place to mine because "there are a lot of users online at the same time, keeping the browser open for a long time." The largest video torrent search engine, The Pirate Bay, was recently exposed to use Coinhive, and CBS's Showtime website is also quietly doing the same activity. Meshkov suggested:

If a website wants to make money by mining through users' computers, the most ethical way is to first ask for users' consent and let them choose. In fact, such mining may be more ethical than advertising, after all, no one ever asks us if we want to see ads on the website.

While the Coinhive team has issued a statement requiring website operators to ask users for their consent before using their CPU to mine cryptocurrency, Meshkov believes this recommendation will be difficult to enforce.

For example, they cannot ban secret mining activities.

He said there are ways to prevent websites from running cryptocurrency mining scripts without users' consent.

Recently, a popular CDN (content distribution network) service provider Cloudflare has begun to suspend website accounts and services that start mining without user consent.

Many ad blocking and antivirus software have also begun to add browser mining blocking functions.