Beware of sites farming your CPU power thru the web browser

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My Dear Friends

Have you ever thought while surfing the internet you suddenly felt your Laptop / Computer 's fan kicks in and started going crazy and heating up and you are not even playing a game ?

YOUR COMPUTER COULD BE MINING ! AND YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW IT !

Unfortunately you would not see a cent of the proceeds however it would all go to the account of the miner who placed the "hack" in the website you visited.

W T F ?

Coinhive offers a JavaScript miner for the Monero Blockchain (Why Monero?) that you can embed in your website. Coin-Hive.Com

When Coin-Hive was launch it was actually for websites to monetize without using too much ads as it becomes a trade-off with using your browsing time to mine for some CRYPTOs

Of course hackers used it as an opportunity to monetize it in the masses so what they did was to hack websites and embed their codes into it or create a magnitude of websites that when each time someone surfs to it , it would start mining.

A number of the commonly used website would be those free "MOVIE STREAMING" or even torrent sites like ThePiratebay has these embedded into their sites .

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What are the symptoms

• Very high CPU and graphics cards usage
• Web browser is using more than 50% of the CPU power
• PC tries to connects to Coin-Hive.com/lib/coin-hive.com.min.js
• Windows minimize and maximize slowly, and programs run slower
• PC becomes very sluggish and slow and have to be restarted

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Which sites are affected ?

There is a list which I am not very sure its updated , however you can check it out at https://github.com/keraf/NoCoin/blob/master/src/blacklist.txt

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What can i do to remove it ?

You could use Coin-Hive Blocker which is a Chrome Extention

Another recommended utility would be AdGuard - http://adguard.com

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How ELSE can I be infected apart from going to Websites ?

I got to find out that coin-hive is also able to be injected thru "FREE WIFI Networks" . These are unsecured networks where you fill up a form or watch an advert then you get free WiFi ?

Yes those network if they are using simple routers embedded with open source router operating systems such as DDWRT or OPENWRT , its easily manipulated and inject a code to start the coin-hive miner in your machine.

So BEWARE of using Free WiFi / Untrusted WiFI as there could be hackers out there taking away more then just your CPU/GPU power.

Another method is Android APPS where a number of APPs has this build in. So when your phone starts getting heated for no apparent reasons, you may be infected.

Here is a quick video which you may want to watch for more info.

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Stay Safe and Have a Great Day