Starbucks Wi-Fi Hijacked to Mine "Bitcoin"

Haloo Dear Steemit

Noah Dinkin was surprised to find his laptop inserted with a virtual money miner's malware when connected to a Starbucks Wi-Fi cafe in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Apparently the hotspot in the cafe in question has been hijacked by hackers to install the virtual money miner's malware on the visitor's computer secretly.

"Hi Starbucks, did you know that your cafe's Wi-Fi providers in Buenos Aires forced a 10-second pause when they first connected to Wi-Fi to mine Bitcoin with customers' laptops?" Dinkin said on Twitter, in a chirp addressed to Starbucks.

Dinkin, a technology company CEO, said the virtual currency being mined by the malware is Bitcoin.

However, CoinHive, the party that provides the code for the miner's malware, just mines another virtual currency called Monero.

The quiet mining of virtual currency on other people's computers has recently begun to emerge. Especially the value of various virtual currencies such as Bitcoin increasingly uphill.

Pirate Bay pirated content sites, for example, had run a miner program on their visitors' computers to seek additional revenue outside advertising, without the visitor's knowledge.

Malware miner uses victim computer power to help "mine" aka process complicated computation process necessary to generate virtual currency. Because of the large number of victims, the power generated was multiplied.

The problem is, the miner malware burdens the computer thereby reducing performance. At the end of the compromised computer the miner gets hot and slow to the detriment of the victim.

Back in the case in Buenos Aires, Starbucks claimed that the troubled Wi-Fi hotspot has been dealt with and now no longer infects a visitor's computer with malware.

"Wi-Fi is not run by Starbucks. We do not own or control it, "said Starbucks spokesman Reggie Borges, as summarized KompasTekno from Motherboard, Friday (15/12/2017). "This problem is not widespread among our stores," he continued.

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