Crypto Update: Are You One of the Billions Unwittingly Mining Cryptocurrency?

According to a recent report many popular sites including Openload, Streamango, Rapidvideo and OnlineVideoConverter have been forcing users to mine Monero cryptocurrency.

Do you find it hard to believe that every month more than one billion visitors to four popular video sites are being unwittingly forced to mine cryptocurrency? Apparently this is the real deal and this type of nefarious activity is called cryptojacking.

The video sites Openload, Streamango, Rapidvideo and OnlineVideoConverter are allegedly loading mining software on to visitors’ computers, making them generate tokens for the bitcoin-like cryptocurrency Monero, according to security firm Adguard.

“We came across several very popular websites that secretly use the resources of users’ devices for cryptocurrency mining,” said Andrey Meshkov, co-founder of Adguard. “According to SimilarWeb, these four sites register 992m visits monthly.”

So the way it works is that the mining program is loaded into the users’ browser when the video player is downloaded ready to stream the video. Then, it begins mining while all the while, victims are not notified have no clue that their computer is working hard to generate Monero. If you know what to look for, you may be able to uncover this activity on your computer or a friend's, the biggest symptom is that the computer suspected of mining will be running unusually slowly while playing videos.

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Meshkov said: “The total monthly earnings from this cryptojacking, taking into account the current Monero rate, can reach $326,000. These are simply outrageous figures.”

The video sites also benefit from their video players being embedded in other sites, which can still load the mining program, therefore spreading their reach and potential money generation.

So now you know that the process of cryptojacking Monero is the culprit behind these bogged down machines but why pick it rather than Bitcoin? This is because mining Monero is much easier to mine incognitio and in behind-the-scenes operations such as cryptojacking. Pieter Arntz, malware intelligence researcher at Malwarebytes explains “Monero mining does not depend on heavily specialised, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), but can be done with any CPU or GPU. Without ASICs, it is almost pointless for an ordinary computer to participate in the mining process for Bitcoin.”

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There are a few other benefits to simply holding and using Monero. Firstly, it's virtually untraceable and it's faster to mine and confirm transactions, says Arntz, making it easier to get away with cryptojacking.

“The popularity of cryptojacking has grown with alarming speed,” said Meshkov. “At the moment, the only real solution is to use an ad blocker, an antivirus or one of the specialised extensions to combat cryptojacking.”

In an effort to solve these problems, there are currently discussions going on as to whether security protocols to block cryptojacking should be built directly into browsers including Chromium, the open-source browser that underpins Google’s Chrome browser.

Of course, Openload, Streamango, Rapidvideo and OnlineVideoConverter were unavailable for comment about these activities for fear of public outrage.

What do you guys think about cryptojacking? Is your computer running unusually slow? Will this become increasingly common?

Let us know your thoughts!

Thanks for reading @techblogger

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Source:

Billions of video site visitors unwittingly mine cryptocurrency as they watch - The Guardian

Image Source:

www.theguardian.com

www.bitcoin.com