Over 500 million PCs are secretly mining cryptocurrency, report

There are multiple ways to get your hands on cryptocurrency, one of the possible ways is ‘Mining‘ which can give you cryptocurrency out of thin air. The miners run a special mining software and take part in processing transactions that have happened over that coin network.

Researchers have discovered that 500 million PC users are inadvertently mining for cryptocurrency owing to visiting websites that have mining scripts installed in the background. The mining of cryptocurrencies is, although, happening in users PCs but the mined cryptocurrency is given to the website owners, a very unfair scenario.

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The research has been done by Ad blocking firm AdGuard. AdGuard found that as many as 220 popular websites with a reader base of half billion people are using crypto mining scripts in the background without any disclosures.

Owing to this, the visitors from US have been the majorly impacted segment. 18.7 percent US websites are engaged in the crypto mining activity. According to the research, these scripts hack the CPU of a machine, and then a part of it is reserved for the crypto mining efforts affecting the performance of PC and making it considerably slower.

Most of the websites involved in such an activity are considered non-credible, shady and low quality but the experts are foreseeing the mainstream credible website adopt this way of generating revenue in future. But these websites will first have to take a permission of users before installing any such script to readers’ PCs.

For now, if you think your PC is running slow, you might want to check if it has become a part of a huge crypto mining network.