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posted by janrinok on Friday February 09 2018, @11:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the true-cost-of-watching-porn dept.

Motherboard writes about dodgy, javascript-using web sites which are throwing a little extra CPU load onto visitors and hoping they won't notice much.

Netlab 360's analysis suggests that in-browser cryptocurrency mining, which stormed back onto the world stage in 2017 after being dormant for several years (likely due to low cryptocurrency prices) via a torrent site is now chiefly the purview of porn sites. It's worth noting, too, that criminals have found some pretty creative ways to get people to mine cryptocurrency for them outside of website visits, including hacking an Argentine internet provider.

In-browser cryptocurrency mining has the potential to eat up your computer's resources and slow down your machine, making the trend of particular interest to cyber security researchers lately. Last year, Symantec predicted that in-browser mining would turn into an "arms race" in 2018 as malicious actors come up with even more inventive (and invasive) methods of mining digital coins with someone else's machine.

Source : Porn Sites Are Doing the Most Cryptocurrency Mining


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:15AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:15AM (#635915)

    > If you're looking at porn, you're probably not doing much serious stuff on you machine at the same time...

    Unless you're looking at porn to kill time while your parallelised number-crunching code is running. (Um, or so I heard.)

    > So, between mining a few coins and having ugly disruptive flashing ads, what's the better solution to get that content provider a few pennies for that bandwidth?

    Hah, like there's a snowball's chance in hell of them removing ads after adding a cryptominer. You'll spend half your cycles on Javascript ads, and the rest on Javascript mining.