Research shows half a billion people are secretly mining cryptocurrencies and don’t even know it

By Heather Hamilton, contributing writer

An article on bitcoin.com reports that there are as many as half a billion people mining cryptocurrencies without actually knowing that they’re doing it. Adguard, an advertisement-blocking program, recently analyzed the most popular 100,000 websites as ranked by Alexa for cryptocurrency-mining scripts. Each website running the script earned around $43,000 within the three-week study period, and users had no idea.

By using user browsers to mine cryptocurrencies, the mining remains undetected. Adguard co-founder and CTO Andrew Meshkov announced the results of the study last week. “We looked for the codes for Coinhive and JSEcoin, the most popular solutions for browser mining in use now,” said Meshkov.

Newsweek reports that these tools work by hijacking a computer’s central processing unit in order to mine bitcoins. This can affect the machine’s performance, slowing it down by using processing power.

More than 200 of the websites were using crypto-mining scripts, targeting the United States, India, Russia, and Brazil most heavily. “We found 220 sites that launch mining when a user opens their main page, with an aggregated audience of 500 million people,” wrote Meshkov. “These people live all over the world; there are sites with users from the USA, China, South American and European countries, Russia, India, Iran … and the list goes on.”

Even at the relatively and comparatively low rate of $43,000 over three weeks, Meshkov emphasizes that the money was made at almost zero cost to the site owners.

The sites running cryptocurrency-mining scripts primarily fall into four categories, including TV and video sites, file-sharing, adult sites, and news and media. Many of these sites are categorized as shady and thus have trouble making money from advertising. Meshkov explained that video-streaming sites are ideal for this sort of thing because they have a large audience that keeps sites open on their browser for a long period of time. The Pirate Bay, a popular torrent site, was recently exposed for using Coinhive to generate revenue without asking audience permission or allowing them to opt out.

Coinhive has asked website owners to acquire user permission prior to using their computers to mine cryptocurrencies but cannot really enforce it. “For example, they cannot forbid stealth mining,” explained Meshkov. Cloudflare, a CDN service, has begun suspending accounts and preventing service to sites that mine without user permission, and Meshkov says that other ad-blockers, including Adguard, and antivirus programs are following suit with block features.

Sources: bitcoin.com, Torrent Freak, Adguard, Newsweek
Image Source: Pixabay