2 min read
With the recent surge in the pricing of Bitcoin, it is becoming difficult for a common man to afford it. Mining is another way a person can get their hands on cryptocurrency by processing transactions on the blockchain network. But crypto mining is also becoming difficult owing to the resources and power consumption.
Some sneaky websites’ owners have found yet another way to mine cryptocurrency without making a mining farm. They are using cloud mining technique by using the CPU power of their website visitors to mine crypto-coins for themselves.
See Also: Bitcoin mining collectively consumes more electricity than 159 countries
According to a recent report, 500 million PC users are involved in crypto mining as a result of visiting a website that installs a script in their browser for cryptocurrency mining. Owing to this, the visitors from the 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.
Now a new research from anti-malware company Malwarebytes says that these sneaky and shady websites have found a way to run their miners even when you close the browser. The mining happens as a result of a pop-under window that opens up when you open the website. The pop-under window sits beneath your taskbar clock on a windows device and hence is not visible to the users.
Either the user can close it through task manager or by restarting the system. Pretty selfish act by website owners. If some portion of the mined coins is given to the website visitors, then there might be a lot of users who would happily lend their CPU powers to mining. Till then, let’s wait for the adblockers websites to save us from these sneaky scripts.
